Laura (Savannah Faye), a mother seeking help for her four-year-old son, seeks solace from her friend Paul (Matt Stabile) in the world premiere of Gina Montet’s Dangerous Instruments at Palm Beach Dramaworks. (Photos by Curtis Brown Photography)
By Bill Hirschman
Pain, despair and desperation deepen in a swirling descent into a dread-encrusted darkness in the world premiere of Gina Montét’s Dangerous Instruments closing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 25th season.
Clearly, this isn’t spring lark musical; instead, it is a grueling drama occasionally relieved with ebony gallows wit that should be performed throughout the country.
It tracks the tragic losing journey of a mother trying to get the public bureaucracy to help her son — brilliantly gifted but critically, emotionally and behaviorally impaired — as their fate circles an ever-worsening plummet into a nightmare.
But it is a must-see for those caring about how our society flails at this very human quandary. The well-crafted evening ravages the limitations of our community’s response – not just its physical and economic limitations, but that of the bureaucracy’s self-imposed, self-protecting boundaries and rationalizations.
The play, while semi-naturalistic, is unembarrassed that it has a mission to educate and alarm. It is simultaneously an illustration and an indictment that is unafraid to skirt the edges of plausibility with theatrically emotional techniques.
Montét’s incisive script is embodied by a committed cast and masterful director Margaret M. Ledford’s carefully measured construction of its hills, valleys and black holes.
Laura is a middle-aged South Florida working widow with coiffed hair and professional’s business outfit who can no longer ignore that her four-year-old son exhibits serious problems needing the expertise of the various levels of education and social service experts in the community.
We never meet Daniel face-to-face as he travels during the play to 13 years old. But it’s not necessary because Laura and the others describe his issues in detail: a lack of impulse control that eventually fails to stem an increasingly violent streak, a loner who can go 10 days without talking, who cannot even connect with his mother at times, yet when he has deeply upset her he can fold complex origamis of flowers she likes. All of these qualities intensify as he approaches puberty.
Year by year, we follow Laura’s procession of meetings with teachers, through one institution and department after another. She is smart, insistent, inventive. Following each meeting, an interview with the other official — conducted after an “incident” when Daniel turned 13 — is projected on the back wall of the stage. Each time in past tense they reflect on what went wrong and usually rationalizing their responsibility for what happened.
We say “what happened” because from the second scene on, it becomes inescapable that something — dramaturgically-wise withheld from us for most the evening — has occurred in the present. Montét makes no secret that we are watching an arc that will end in tragedy. That we know this makes the coming nightmare worse
As the years pass and the parade of people responsible for helping, Laura’s never-flagging offers of cooperation and help are sandblasted.
LAURA: So, what do we do about it?
BLAKE: (An exhausted teacher) That’s not my call.
LAURA: Does he need discipline? Do we hug it out? Bigger rewards? Harsher punishments? What’s my next move? Should I spank him, take him to Disney or roll him a joint?
Later, as the noose tightens, her unrewarded persistence becomes engulfed in desperation as she pleads with a mental health professional on the verge of removing Daniel from the program: “I don’t care if you make progress – just tread water.”
Technically, the bureaucracy and its denizens are the bad guys here, as they regularly cut off Laura’s pleas seeking at least future options. Some say they care, and possibly some do, but they each reach a point where they offer copious apologies as they surrender with excuses.
Here is one of the strengths designed by Montét and Ledford: They paint smiling people who believe in their own minds that they want to help; they are not meant to be viewed as monsters. We even feel a shred of sympathy for them. But we see they lack the imagination and the guts to challenge the boundaries of the system.
In those videoed post-incident interviews, they are calm, collected and increasingly aggravating to us. They are assured that they did what they could have. Each is so honest and sincere that they did the right thing, sometimes with a practiced pronouncement or a shrug of those who know the limits and hide behind them.
Savannah Faye
After Montét and Ledford, awe is due Savannah Faye’s commandingly heroic creation of Laura. Faye is fresh out of an MFA program and, while she has acted in college, this marks her first professional performance.
Faye’s triumph is charting a lengthy emotional journey that starts off with equanimity and then deteriorates one discernable step at a time without simply seeming to be coming unglued in each scene to the same level 10 level.
But ultra-skilled Ledford not only gauges the necessarily varied levels of emotion, but she and the cast create intensity whether moving about the stage on in extended seated one-on-one sections of the confrontations.
So kudos also are due the supporting cast: Matt Stabile as Paul, a friend to Laura and her late husband; Jessica Farr as a teacher and later as an entitled parent at the pre-school; Bruce Linser as an unbending principal and later as a police officer; Maha McCain as an exhausted teacher in her 50s, then as a mental health professional and finally as a hospital social worker.
Scenic designer Samantha Pollack and video designer Adam J. Thompson set the journey in a featureless cement block room painted over to enhance its anonymous institutionalization. It is flanked by a video screen, offers sparse furniture, and a back wall that features theater-size projected film interviews
The play demands without putting it into words what do we do about it? And the last few seconds, likely a meld of director and playwright – not in the printed script – is hard to shake.
The title is drawn from a legal concept in Florida that holds that the owner of an inherently dangerous “tool: is legally responsible for any injuries that result for the “operation of that tool” even if it is used by someone else.
The playwright is a teacher who was captured by what elements played into school violence. Montét began working on Dangerous Instruments in 2020 while her play The Prey received an onstage reading during the Perlberg Festival of New Plays. Dangerous Instruments also was read at the festival in 2023. Her play Overactive Letdown premiered at Theatre Lab in 2023.
Dangerous Instruments plays through June 1 at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Plays Wednesday through Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Matinee performances Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2 p.m.. Post-performance discussions follow Wednesday and Thursday matinees. Running time 95 minutes with no intermission.
Tickets for all performances are $92. Student tickets for $15 with a valid K-12 or university/college ID, and anyone under 40 pays $40 (no additional fees) with a photo ID. Tickets for educators and active military are half price with proper ID (other restrictions apply). Tickets can be purchased through the box office, in person or by phone (561-514-4042 ext. 2), and online 24 hours a day at palmbeachdramaworks.org.
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