Son and elderly mother face a reckoning in Next Act Theatre's crisp 'The Treasurer'
Only three or four times in "The Treasurer" do characters make physical contact with each other, and most of those touches are between a salesperson and customer.
They spend much of their time on the phone or online.
If you find those situations both unnerving and familiar, you are not alone in this century.
In dramatizing the painful relationship between a middle-aged son and his declining mother, Next Act Theatre's new production of Max Posner's play also depicts forces and decisions that isolate people, even in this overconnected world.
The Son (Reese Madigan) does not love his elderly mother Ida (Annabel Armour), who walked out on the family when he was a boy. But his siblings persuade him to be her financial overseer, because he's the one who can be "firm." He sees himself as a no-nonsense facts guy, though his poetic monologues that open and close the play suggest his self-reporting needs an audit.
A lesser actor might have made Ida a shrieking harridan, but Armour's portrayal is subtler and more complex. Ida is selfish, a fantasist, manipulator and compulsive spender. She's also frail, lonely, and progressing in dementia. Armour takes her through these facets in a way that reflects the unpredictability of real life.
Madigan's Son is often funny, sometimes ruefully or bitterly, until the endgame nears (both the fraught mother-son relationship and Becca Jeffords' lighting design made me think of Beckett plays). When the climactic moment arrives, like Stephen Dedalus, he will not give his mother the thing she wants. But while Dedalus was standing on youthful principle, the middle-aged Son is too angry to speak.
This is where I want to argue with the Son, who cannot or will not breach the walls holding in his emotions (even though he is married to a therapist). But he can neither open up nor write her off. There's his hell.
Alexis Green and David Flores are excellent in portraying many characters and voices Son and Ida interact with. Based on what they do here, including their marvelous facial expressions, both have a great future ahead in sales and workplace behavior training videos!
This is Next Act artistic director Cody Estle's directorial debut here. It's a crisp, clear production performed largely on a minimal set until the surprise of a late scene (design by Jeffrey D. Kmiec and Milo Bue).
If you go
Next Act Theatre performs "The Treasurer" through May 19 at 255 S. Water St. For tickets, visit nextact.org or call (414) 278-0765.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Son and elderly mother face a reckoning in Next Act's 'The Treasurer'
