By Kent Straith

FERNDALE, MI–A visit to the Ringwald Theatre in downtown Ferndale always brings a touch of mystery…like a child with a Christmas countdown calendar who gets up every morning wondering what lies behind that door.

The Ringwald, contained within the Affirmations LGBT community center, is a tiny, but malleable venue where selling every seat to every show must be prioritized. Having visited in December for Jingle Babs, I knew that the house maxes out at about 55 seats…so when I entered before seeing Beautiful Thing, and counted forty two chairs, I knew that this creative decision was made for a reason.

This piece, first performed and firmly set in 1993 (thanks to the total lack of modern technology and numerous references to then-living British icons Princess Diana and Lady Margaret Thatcher) by Jonathan Harvey is a coming of age love story in gritty, unglamorous, hardscrabble East London. Though there are only five actors in the cast, and each one very important to the story, the plot centers on Jamie and Ste, two teen boys who live in what Americans would call “the projects” – post-war, cheaply built apartment complexes with open courtyards and “paper thin walls” that become an important plot point.

The play is set almost entirely in a single location: one of those courtyards accessible to three adjoining apartments, whose inhabitants we come to meet.  Fifteen year old Jamie (Cole VanAmberg) lives with his mother Sandra (Jamie Warrow), a forty year old bar manager who maintains an endless string of doomed relationships, most recently the much younger Tony (Garett Michael Harris), the good natured, slightly cringy goofball who doesn’t live with mother and son, but is around a lot, and straddles the line between being Jamie’s male role model and his friend. In the other apartments are Leah (Fernanda Hernandez), a teen girl who has been expelled from her school, leaving her all the time in the world to experiment with drugs and indulge her obsession with the late folk singer, Cass Elliot, and in the next flat over, Jamie’s slightly older school friend Ste (nick Easterling) and his never seen, physically abusive father.

In defense of my using a lot of words to describe the characters, let it be known that Beautiful Thing is not burdened with a ton of excess plot. Some stories are one event after another, but here, it’s all about allowing the audience to learn about and understand the characters. All our players have different motivations, but they are all connected by their disconnection and loneliness. Jamie feels adrift in the world, parented by someone who is often a child herself. Sandra is trapped between the responsibilities of career/parenthood and her longing to extend her vanishing youth. Ste is desperately searching for an escape from his hellish existence at home, while Leah’s separation from school and other kids her age has put her into a deepening spiral of obsession with a singer who even in 1993 had been dead for two decades. Tony is…trying to get laid on a regular basis, sure. But he’s also vulnerable to emotional attachment, and searching for something real.

So, as not to skip over what the show is, at its core, about, Jamie and Ste discover/come to terms with their queerness during the play and start a loving first-romance that is accepted by all involved. Honestly, it’s all possibly accepted a little too quickly and completely to accurately depict the early 90s–but America is all this writer knows–so it’s hard to say for sure.

The cast all does great work here. Anchored by VonAmberg (looking distractingly like a young Edward Norton) and Easterling who are very convincing in their roles as puppy-dog teen and introverted grump. One thing that did occur to me during one of the scenes where Ste is portrayed as having been beaten by his dad is that Easterling has the height and build of a professional athlete, which does make you wonder of the terrible man behind his front door “how big IS that guy?” Hernandez does a great job of bringing a shrill, unlikeable person to life, and Warrow shines especially in the scene where she is coming to terms with her son’s sexuality. You can feel the unspoken grief for the life she anticipated for him mixed with a very well founded fear for his health which are eventually overwhelmed with love.

It’s a rare thing in a theatre review where I want to shine a light on the dialect coach, but if you need one, call Foster Johns. My ear is not sophisticated enough to know what a really great Cockney accent sounds like, but I feel like I can spot a bad one (God love you, Dick Van Dyke), and everyone here sounds very authentic and you have to pinch yourself to remember that their voices are part of the performance.

If I have two minor complaints, they would be that the confines of the stage lead to a rather odd set design choice when it comes to a plastic lounge chair facing what I consider to be the wrong way, which sounds like a ludicrous nit to pick, except for that most of the audience ends up viewing a couple of scenes from the back and through the slats of a plastic lounge chair, which is not ideal. Also, while both lead actors individually do a fine job with their roles, they don’t really appear to be remotely the same age. If you told me that Easterling was 7-10 years older than VonAmberg, I would absolutely believe it. But it’s called “acting”, not “being.”

Generally, this is a more than worthwhile story that is rightfully being seen now as a time capsule of a different era. Come for the tender relationship drama…stay for the spectacular and hilarious juxtaposition in a music cue that I won’t give away here. At the end, as the characters who stay (one sadly has to leave) dance to the dreamlike tones of Mama Cass, relationships change and what seemed like genuine animosity is left behind. Beautiful Thing was and remains a must see for all in and around this community.

(Beautiful Thing is playing at the Ringwald Theatre on 9 Mile Road in Ferndale, now through April 1. Remaining shows are probably sold out, but inquire about tickets at www.simpletix.com or by calling the Ringwald at 248-545-5545)