Theatre Review: I Was Most Alive With You Is Biblically Humbling
The Book of Job is the hardest chapter to understand in the Bible, and is often a “go-to” for atheists to get a “rise” out of of Christians. Why? Because God does not look too appealing in this chapter. He becomes challenged by The Devil to let him ruin Job’s life so as to see if he remains loyal to him. Job, God’s “favorite,” loses EVERYTHING! He even tries to kill himself! Though God, eventually, replenishes and doubles all that Job had, you wonder why he let this good man go through such horror, especially when his family had to be devastated for him to learn how to overcome devastation. On this notion, writer Craig Lucas’ I Was Most Alive With You begins.
They always say that God and Satan work through persons, which means love and suffering happens through people. You can see this dynamic throughout I Was Most Alive With You as you watch a family become eviscerated by “bad luck” or simply life. Frankly, the play is tragic, dense, and, at times, perplexing. You want to cry from how many bad things are happening to EVERYONE. While it is screenwriter Ash (Michael Gaston) that is comparing his life to Job for a new show, with the assistance of his “assistant” Astrid (Marianna Bassham), everybody in this play has a perfect reason to enter fetal position. Addiction, hand amputation, crashing careers, loneliness, affairs, suicide, depression, unrequited loves, financial crises: all these are situations that our family of characters undergo in 2 hours and 15 minutes: with a 15 minute intermission. This is a lot to absorb as a viewer, but, in a way, that is Craig Lucas and directed Tyne Rafaeli’s point.
Two hours may be a really short time to handle all those subjects, but as you watch Knox (Russell Harvard) fall off the sobriety wagon and sink into a crippling depression, with good reason, or witness his mom, Pleasant (Lisa Emery), feel like a “no one” in her family, you cannot say that a whole life would be much time to get over such pain. There would never be enough time to recuperate, unless, you made it, which is something the characters or not. For them, suffering never ends, but you wonder when joy begins. In this idea, I Was Most Alive With You amps a strange commonality between all of us in that we do not know how to be happy through our hurts because we really do believe there is a day when nothing bad will happen
In I Was Most Alive With You, trauma and misery fight to be each characters’ consistent friend, which makes these exceptional actors go through an emotional Olympics. Things get so dark that the show’s title feels sadistic. Everyone is struggling to feel alive, practically for the first time, and, like Job, you wonder: Where is God? Yet, that was Craig Lucas point. Hence, when you get the Playbill at I Was Most Alive With You, I highly suggest you read Craig’s interview on how the play was inspired by the notion of humility. It helps you grasp and ponder all its nuances and messages: revealing how deeply philosophical it is. Still, I humbly challenge Lucas’ perspective of both The Bible and his own work.
From Clara (Lois Smith) losing her money and health to Farhad (Tad Cooley) “up and down” addiction struggles, I felt like I saw Job, not as literally, but symbolically. Like Job, from the beginning, it is set that Ash has known success and had a really great life until these hard times. Yet, as cracks begin to show in situations and relationships, you wonder: Did he really? Sure, problems can simply appear, but suffering never leaves. It is always apart of life, and I Was Most Alive With You made me wonder if it is that Satan appears in Job’s life or reveals that he was always there: waiting and building a plot against him that could push him into an emotional grave. Ash never noticed how many wound were forming around him, within his family, because he felt “blessed”, but his fall from grace goes beyond superficial sentiments.
It is not that Satan challenged God for Job’s heart as much as Satan challenged Job for God’s heart or rather how his heart could be God. I Was Most Alive With You is a rough watch because, though these characters are heightened in their string of tragedies, you realize no one is stable or finds love and joy within themselves. Thus, perhaps the message of Job/ I Was Most Alive With You is that humility is accepting suffering as apart of life, and using the peace you gain from that acceptance to find strength, love, and joy starts within you. Like Job, every character loses everything, but also, like him, they only saw what they had when it was gone, and did not have themselves/ self-love to handle it. If you only define joy according to what you have, even in people, then you will find it fleeting compared to suffering. For More Information On I Was Most Alive With You plays until October 14 at the Playwrights Horizon. Click Here To Buy Tickets. Location: 416 W. 42nd St.
