Introspection and Grunge Obsession

Start with a past of substance addiction, add manic depression, and top with obsession. Then let the layers set. Served cold at Playwright Horizons, tragedian Christopher Shinn’s On the Mountain is a grippingly insightful, though eerily humorless, depiction of psychotic individuals and their unhealthy relationships with each other.

The play’s central relationship is between Sarah (Amy Ryan, HBO’s The Wire), an ex-alcoholic, and her 16-year-old daughter Jaime (Alison Pill, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen), who is clinically depressed. They live together in a comfortable suburban house outside of Portland, Ore. Jaime has withdrawn from school and spends her time lounging in the backyard while listening to Radiohead on her iPod or writing hermetic stories on the living room Macintosh. Meanwhile, Sarah spends her days—fraught with guilt over the harm her alcoholism inflicted on Jaime—working as a waitress.

In the first scene, Sarah flirtatiously leads a stranger (Ebon Moss-Brach) into the kitchen. Ten minutes later, she embraces Carrick (we learn his name only a little after Sarah does) and they start making love on the kitchen counter. It’s not as simple as it seems, however. We come to realize that Carrick, a music fetishist, initially dates Sarah because she possesses the only copy of an unrecorded Jason Carlyle song—a grunge rock icon who killed himself (read Kurt Cobain).

That’s pretty much the plot. The action of the play accounts, however, only for the tip of the iceberg. The script elliptically meanders in and out of private moments between Jaime and Sarah, Sarah and Carrick, Carrick and Jaime, and shortly between Sarah and a different suitor, the ex-narcotic Phil.

Yet despite its lack of concrete action or real resolution of the intriguing rock ’n’ roll subplot, On the Mountain is far from boring. The characters and actors take us into their world through the realism of their painful emotions and the questions they raise.

In the argument that ends her relationship with Carrick, Sarah proclaims that an individual is responsible for her own life—Jaime, despite her mental state, should find a job. Carrick frenetically shouts that everything is the world’s fault and that Jaime needs a place to withdraw and write her stories. It’s an argument that is never resolved (like much of the play), but is nonetheless thought-provoking.

Jamie is the jewel of the play. Shinn and Pill exquisitely craft her character and her relationship with Sarah. Pill brings the hardships of Jaime’s adolescence to life—her chubby face twinkles with creativity as she charmingly blabbers about her friends and her group therapy.

But Pill’s Jaime is also a stabbing image of human dejection and isolation. One night she comes home to hear the erotic screams of her mother coming from the upstairs bedroom. An eerie Radiohead song submerges the noises at the same time as the blackout engulfs Jaime’s expression of disgust. Later, in her T-shirt coated with vomit (the result of an overdose of Vicodin), she curls up on the couch in a fetal position, oblivious to Carrick’s attempts at humor.

On the Mountain is not light entertainment. There is no redemption, no hope, no laughter. Yet maybe it is this aspect that enables the painful accuracy of Shinn’s pen to delve into human psychology undistracted.

If so, I wouldn’t want it any other way.