Like Bernard Pomerance’s Elephant Man and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, Jessica Cavanagh’s Self Injurious Behavior takes us into the minefield of wrenching, personal tragedy, without exploiting our emotions. Summer and Jake have a son named Benjamin, who falls along the autistic spectrum. He requires vigilance, patience and stamina. His meltdowns (for lack of a better word) are epic and exhausting. Summer is pushed beyond what anyone should be expected to endure, and reunites with sisters Harmony and Sage for a break, camping out at a Renaissance Faire Festival, kicking back and enjoying some serious downtime.
A thread of the fanciful informs Self Injurious Behavior. The image of Peter Pan (lost boys) the grownups gathering and giving themselves permission to play for a few days: Camping out, munching out, catching a buzz, dressing up in bright costumes, shouting Huzzah! Adults love to play! The realms of the fantastic and carelessness stand in high relief to the world where Summer must be constantly watchful, where she and Benjamin are so often be robbed of the simple joy of distraction.
Playwright Cavanagh details Summer’s Herculean struggles with compassion and humor. Her pain is not the sole focus, but it creeps up. The overwhelming sadness, frustration, guilt, despair. Cavanaugh explores Summer’s life apart from her interaction with Benjamin, too. We see how it affects her life so pervasively. The bond between mother and child is so primal and intuitive, sometimes the detachment needed isn’t easy to come by. Cavanagh also considers the effect of men who (however unconsciously indoctrinated) diminish and dismiss women, rather than validate the depth of their suffering. When Jake returns from touring and complains about Summer’s housekeeping, you want to crack his skull.
It would have been easy to use intense, melodramatic events to wring emotions from us, to take advantage of our sympathy. But instead Cavanagh finds the quiet, awful moments: the arrogance of Jake’s clueless new wife, asking her mother for help, confiding with her sisters in the midst of a dark patch. Self Injurious Behavior achieves poignancy by respecting us, giving us credit for intelligence and inference. Knowing that Jessica Cavanagh forged this masterful work from her own experience, just makes it that much more phenomenal. Her involvement never eclipses what the script needs to be.
Theatre Too presents the World Premiere of Self Injurious Behavior, playing May 17th-June 10th, 2018. The Quadrangle : 2800 Routh Street, Suite 168, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-871-3300. www.theatre3dallas.com