Heavy doses of sarcasm are probably not a recommended therapy for recovering addicts. And yet as wielded by Kathleen Turner’s Sister Jamison Connelly in “High,” the sensation-stuffed drama by Matthew Lombardo that opened Tuesday night at the Booth Theater, the withering retort ultimately achieves better results than more soothing approaches.
And when it is channeled through Ms. Turner’s sandpapery basso, sarcasm has a ferocious comic bite that makes the early innings of Mr. Lombardo’s improbable drama about faith, recovery and redemption crackle with lively humor. Biting into Sister Jamie’s mordant verbal assaults on a recalcitrant drug addict, all but smacking her lips like a gourmet savoring al dente pasta, Ms. Turner makes a feast of largely unexceptional dialogue.
Sister Jamie, as she’s called, works as a counselor at a live-in rehab center. She is none too pleased when her boss, Father Michael Delpapp (Stephen Kunken), assigns her a particularly challenging case, a dead-eyed 19-year-old druggie, Cody Randall (Evan Jonigkeit), who was found strung out on heroin in a motel room in the company of a 14-year-old boy dead from an overdose.
Still exhausted and suffering from withdrawal symptoms, the sullen Cody greets Sister Jamie’s attempts to probe into his past with snickering contempt. But Sister Jamie is unruffled. She’s not the kind of nun likely to break into songs about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, or greet her charge’s hostilities by waving a wimple as a white flag.
Sister Jamie eschews a habit to dress in a figure-slimming black suit, with a small crucifix pin the only advertisement of her calling. Her fondness for cursing would bring a blush to the cheek of a longshoreman. And she is frank about her own struggles with addiction and her tortured emotional past. When Cody haltingly begins confessing that he smokes pot and snorts cocaine, she is unimpressed. “I did all that in the ’70s,” she cracks, adding one of her customary expletives.
“High,” directed by Rob Ruggiero, isn’t a particularly subtle or deep drama, despite some fancy narration about the conversion of St. Augustine and the mysterious ways of God in shaping human destinies. (It’s about on the level of “Looped,” Mr. Lombardo’s formulaic play about Tallulah Bankhead, which briefly played on Broadway last season and which was also directed by Mr. Ruggiero.) But it does afford Ms. Turner’s fans a choice opportunity to bask in her undeniable star wattage. Her performance as the tough but troubled Sister Jamie is funny, consistently entertaining and at times satisfyingly hammy.
An actress who does not shy from the savvy deployment of outright mannerism, Ms. Turner plants long, portentous pauses in her many addresses to the audience, effectively juicing the play’s steady stream of revelations. She flings herself into the drama’s more lurid episodes with impressive physical aplomb, as when a drug-addled Cody strips naked and threatens to assault his would-be benefactress. And when Sister Jamie reveals the dark truth about the events that sent her spiraling toward addiction, Ms. Turner convincingly exposes the raw wounds beneath the leathery exterior and the urgency of Sister Jamie’s need to believe in the possibility of redemption.
Mr. Jonigkeit, in the play’s other meaty role, doesn’t fare quite as well. The son of a drug-addicted prostitute, Cody was dispatched to bring home customers before he was a teenager. Soon thereafter he was selling sex for drug money under the tutelage of one of his mother’s former patrons, who had also repeatedly raped him. (“High” certainly does not stint on grisly detail.)
But while Cody has been amply supplied with pathologies and an outlandishly toxic past, he doesn’t seem to possess any other notable qualities. As written by Mr. Lombardo, he’s more a sensational case history from an episode of “Law & Order: SVU” than a fully fleshed-out human being.
Mr. Jonigkeit strikes sullen poses and conveys with every twitch the jittery anxiousness of a longtime addict less than committed to recovery. He writhes and hisses in heated ecstasy, like one of those fashionable young vampires tasting fresh blood, when Cody relapses into his old bad habits. But there isn’t much going on beneath the flashy surfaces of the performance; Cody’s suffering, which borders on the suicidal, lacks a convincing emotional core.
The reliable Mr. Kunken (Andy Fastow in the short-lived “Enron”) imbues the mostly functional role of Father Delpapp with a stiff rectitude occasionally inflected with wry humor. (Only Mr. Kunken was not in the premiere production I saw last summer at Hartford Stage.) I’ll spare ticket-holding theatergoers the real gaspers, but it’s fair to disclose that Sister Jamie, in ferreting out the truth about Cody’s past, discovers that Father Delpapp’s motives in bringing him to the rehab center are more mixed than he at first lets on.
The play’s minimalist sets, by David Gallo, have a somber elegance well suited to the more lofty passages in Mr. Lombardo’s play, in which Sister Jamie reflects on faith and temptation, or Father Delpapp quotes from the Bible to persuade Sister Jamie to persevere with Cody because she could be the instrument God has chosen to redeem him.
But most of “High” consists of fraught tussles among the three characters over Cody’s fate and the tough love necessary to put him on the right path. Liberally sprinkled with jargon from the scripture of recovery programs, with a further layer of religiosity, the play is essentially a high-toned version of one of those addictive series about addiction that have become a subgenre of the reality television boom. Whether you prefer the foghorn drawl of Ms. Turner or the more soothing tones of Dr. Drew, of “Celebrity Rehab” fame, is essentially just a matter of taste.
HIGH
By Matthew Lombardo; directed by Rob Ruggiero; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by John Lasiter; music and sound by Vincent Olivieri; makeup by Joe Rossi; production supervisors, Arthur Siccardi and Patrick Sullivan; production stage manager, Bess Marie Glorioso; company manager, Jennifer Hindman Kemp; associate producer, Lawrence J. Moss; general manager, Leonard Soloway. Presented by Leonard Soloway, Chase Mishkin, Terry Schnuck, Ann Cady Scott, Timothy J. Hampton, James and Catherine Berges, Craig D. Schnuck, Barbara and Buddy Freitag, Lauren Class Schneider, David Mirvish, Gene Fisch Jr./Stu Sternbach, David Fagin/Rosalind Resnick, Jacki Barlia Florin/Michael A. Alden and Lizabeth Zindel, the Shubert Organization and the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. At the Booth Theater, 222 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Kathleen Turner (Sister Jamison Connelly), Stephen Kunken (Father Michael Delpapp) and Evan Jonigkeit (Cody Randall).