Thankfully, These Walls Can Talk

Catalyst Gives 'Crumble' a Firm, Funny Foundation

The subprime mortgage crisis makes an apt backdrop for Sheila Callaghan's crafty, eccentric, spikily poetic play "Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)." Now on view in a peppery and hilarious production from Catalyst Theater Company, this rumination on loss and wish-fulfillment (written in 2000) showcases an unusual character: a talking apartment -- inhabited, but as physically neglected as any foreclosed home.

In the Catalyst staging, adroitly directed by Shirley Serotsky, actor Jason Stiles depicts this piece of real estate, which turns out to harbor an arsenal of emotions: bitterness, tenderness, narcissism, despair, even lust. Oh, and a lot of exasperation: Part of a brownstone that was ritzy in the 1800s, the Apartment now houses Janice (Casie Platt), a seriously disturbed 11-year-old, and her mother (Elizabeth Richards), a chef devastated by the recent death of her husband. They don't tend to their dwelling, whose heating system is kaput, and whose plaster is tumbling down in chunks.

As Janice raises sullenness to a high art form, and the approach of Christmas adds to everybody's stress, Janice and Mother seek refuge in fantasies of Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford, respectively. Trysts with the two celebrities (both played by Eric Messner) are far more reassuring than the real-life attentions of Mother's fulsome sister Barbara (Kathleen Akerley), who is childless but owns 57 cats.

As that detail might suggest, up-and-coming playwright Callaghan (whose "We Are Not These Hands" received a Catalyst staging last year) resorts to some easy ironies. Her script also indulges in some showily oddball lyricism ("She wrinkles differently in daylight these days . . . " Mother frets about Janice. "Her voice tilts with a purple cast."). But overall, this 75-minute work is a compellingly steely comic riff on pain. In fact, with its holiday-season setting and magical visitants, "Crumble" is a kind of anti-"A Christmas Carol." Where that tale depicts a Yuletide cosmos in which errors can be fixed and family unity prevails, Callaghan's story tells of a world of fluke accidents and terrible scarrings, where kinship dynamics are about as reliable as nitroglycerine.

Unfurling in a bleak architectural skeleton -- shards of plywood and gaping boards enclosing the odd furnishing (Robbie Hayes is scenic designer) -- Serotsky's production does justice to "Crumble's" wacky but sobering worldview. Richards's haunted face and tense movements (including a near-catatonic stirring of batter) make Mother's suffering seem achingly real. That dark note complements Akerley's smug, cooing Barbara, a deliberate cartoon. Platt's hostile glares and shrieking rants suit the dysfunctional Janice, whose idea of a good time is serving bleach to her stuffed animals, and Messner comes up with priceless spoofs of Timberlake and Ford, without sapping the emotional resonance the story demands from those figures. (Melissa-Leigh Douglass has devised spot-on Timberlake choreography, and lighting designer Jason Cowperthwaite lends ghostly illumination to the spectral celebrities.)

But it's Stiles's capricious, petulant but somehow lovable Apartment who's the truly memorable character, hobbling about with a water pipe in lieu of a cane, reminiscing nostalgically about Victorian housekeeping and hungrily eyeing the 21st-century women who could theoretically give him a fresh coat of paint. Costume designer Debra Kim Sivigny makes him a suitably Dickensian figure, with a shabby black tailcoat, vest and cravat. (For another character, Sivigny contributes what must truly be the ugliest Christmas sweater ever.) But the portrait wouldn't be complete without Matthew M. Nielson's sound design, whose whistlings, drippings, susurrations and creakings make the Apartment seem as fragile as Tiny Tim and as ominous as Jacob Marley.

Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), by Sheila Callaghan. Directed by Shirley Serotsky; original music by Matthew M. Nielson. About 75 minutes. Through June 7 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 Seventh St. SE. Call 800-494-8497 or visit http://www.catalysttheater.org.