Buzz the cat was lost for the umpteenth time. Jimmy, carrying a cat carrier, carefully called his name. It was Christmas, and both of them were in an unfamiliar house. Little did Jimmy know, Buzz was off scratching one of the hosts. When he stumbled into the kitchen, he ran into the other, their conversation cut short when Jimmy’s brother let him know they were leaving.
Jimmy is one of eight characters in Kate Gill’s 75-minute show Americaring, which came to Lyric Hall Theatre on Sunday after its staging at the Midtown International Theater Festival last month. The work follows two families struggling with the fallout of losing healthcare coverage, and the financial precarity of a system in which wealth often dictates the amount and quality of care a person gets.
Rather than focusing on legislation and policymaking, the play uses the loss of insurance as the catalyst of a larger family tragedy. It doesn’t fully show the characters moving through a hospital or struggling to pay bills, but it reverberates through the lenses of addiction, grief, and fractured relationships of the characters. Gill said her play has been in development since the pandemic.
Americaring follows two families through both personal and professional loss, seeking to show the very human scale of substance use disorder, family and workplace conflicts, and an extremely broken healthcare system. One family comprises Frank (Mark Gilchrist), his second wife Marilyn (Fredda Takacs), and their son Kyle (Preston Ottaviano). The other includes Mac (Lou Champagne-Guertin) and his three children Mickey (Carlos Fruzzetti), Annie (Quinn Davis), and Jimmy (Teagan Guertin).
Frank, it turns out, once employed Mac—but fired him while (and, according to the play, because) his wife had breast cancer, cutting off their coverage and sending Mac into a spiral of despair that resulted in alcoholism. Then Frank’s wife was also diagnosed with cancer and died; Marilyn is his second wife, and Kyle’s stepmother. When the play starts, an audience member can see the both families in varying states of disarray.
That is, disarray that is about to get even more messy. When the play begins, Kyle and Annie meet at a walk to raise awareness and money around cancer, in the hopes of getting closer to a cure. At first, it’s a kind of meet cute—until a series of conversations between characters reveals the history between the two families.
It’s a container that works, but can at times feel a little unwieldy. Early on, for instance, Gill delivers the part about Frank firing Mac well. She gives the audience a real-life train problem: does Frank try to insure, and thus better protect, one of his employees’ ailing spouses, thus bankrupting his company, or does he protect his other employees?
There are unresolved questions here—around employer-provided insurance plans, around whether Mac’s wife has a job, around socialized medicine and Medicaid—but those go largely unanswered.
Gill’s writing is strongest when she is probing the nuance of the situation. The audience gradually realizes, for instance, that Frank is a much more sympathetic character than he originally appears, and doesn’t fit neatly into the category of ruthless and money- driven businessman. Mac, too, proves to be more than the town drunk he appears to be at the beginning of the play ,transcending that stereotype.
That it sometimes rings true to the present makes sense: the play is loosely inspired by real life. A coworker of Gill’s brother was fired because their employer couldn’t pay for their spouse’s bills, and the coldness of that action was the “kernel” of the play.
“Yes they have statistics, so many million people don’t have insurance,” Gill said. “But they don’t tell you the ramifications of that.”
In the performance at Lyric Hall, all of the actors delivered. A confrontation between Kyle and Frank was particularly well-acted, from the actors’ posture–balled fists and intense, unflinching eye contact– to their inflection. Kyle’s was accusatory, Frank’s evading, and it fit with the scene.
Another standout performer came from Champagne-Guertin, who when the character was drunk, stumbled around blindly, blinked like he was sensitive to the light, and acted clumsily. When the character decides to get sober, after Annie gets into a car accident, a viewer realizes that he was acting, and not incredibly inebriated.
Fruzzetti also did a wonderful job of acting under the influence. He leaned backwards and forwards while talking, and his eyes would concentrate at the floor for a minute then dart towards the ceiling. The pitch of his voice oscillated in a way that made it feel like he was really out of it.
Americaring’s minimalist set, just two ottomans and a longer bench, helped move the acting along, particularly in scenes that show evolving discord among the families.
In one scene, Annie had invited Kyle over, and they sat on the bench, denoting that they were in Annie’s room. Meanwhile, Mac and Jimmy were on the ottomans in another room. As Mac and Jimmy yelled at each other, Kyle was aghast at how they spoke. When Annie told him that it was like this frequently, the set effectively characterized the entirety of the family.
At moments, Gill’s interest in including multiple traumas gave the audience a lot to hold at once. If the play was to be taken as a singeing indictment of the American healthcare system and how outcomes differ based on income levels, there were other narrative arcs that sometimes got in the way. Romance, the use and sale of narcotics, complicated family dynamics, and wayward pets were just a few.
However, these arcs did make the play feel a bit more realistic, in showing how different people responded to tragedy and stress.
This article comes from the ninth and current cohort of the Arts Council's Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI). From June 29 through August 21, YAJI students pitch, report, write and edit stories with Arts Paper Editor Lucy Gellman, Program Assistants Abiba Biao and Grayce Howe and Mentor Ruby Szekeres. Samir Iydroose is a rising junior at Hamden High School.