The four main characters in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s world premiere staging of “Map of Heaven” are all, to degrees, in need of a map. Their personal and professional foundations are shifting seismically. For them, like most of us, it’s hard to see the road home when the one we’re on now is pocked with unexpected debris. Life has a way of doing that.
It’s a promising but problematic play. One that, in the end, could also use a compass to help find its way home.
Lena is a rising New York painter of artsy maps, and she’s preparing for her first big gallery showing. She’s married to Ian, a big-shot oncologist who, we’re given no choice but to believe, wasn’t always the pompous, pouty jerk we see on the stage. At one point, we’re told, a much more altruistic Ian started a free cancer clinic for uninsured women that’s now underfunded, overcrowded and compromising its patients.
But Ian has lost his way. Now, he just can’t be bothered with it all … because he has taken up flying as a hobby. He flies to Greece, in fact, just to take naps. And whines endlessly about how rough he has it.
Six months before, Lena’s art dealer, Rebecca, sent her younger sister to see Ian, who, it seems, lost her mammogram. But even though this woman appears to us to be the picture of health, she’s not just sick. She’ll be dead before the paint on Lena’s canvas dries. You’d never know it to look at her.
But Ian picked the wrong patient to blow off. Because his mistake jeopardizes not only Ian’s career, but his wife’s.
The chronology and plausibility of these establishing events is structurally suspect. But if you can move past the shaky framework, you’re likely to be swept into a tender, human story about the far-reaching collateral damage one error in judgment can have.
Any audience member’s response to “Map of Heaven” will be inevitably colored by his or her proximity to breast cancer … and marriage. But while it would be easy to see Ian as the embodiment of all that is wrong with the health-care system, playwright Michele Lowe smartly focuses on relationships over politics. Specifically, Lena’s with Ian, and Lena’s with Rebecca.
But when you care more about the fate of the friendship than that of the marriage, that’s a problem.
Lowe’s strength is her contemporary, natural dialogue, which director Evan Cabnet exploits to paint three full, complex and sympathetic women in Lena (Stephanie Janssen), Rebecca (Ponderosa High grad Angela Reed, last seen here playing all the adult women in the national tour of “Spring Awakening”) and Ian’s brilliant but lost sister, Jen (Jessica Love), who has ditched her legal career to become a waitress.
These are terrific portrayals of women cast adrift and searching. We care easily and deeply for each, which only makes it more difficult to feel empathy for Ian (Quentin Maré).
But women might. Married women, specifically, will identify with the sometimes unexpected juxtaposition of place and economic power in a marriage. They’ll identify with how spouses in troubled times are sometimes forced to decide whose path should take priority when it has to be one or the other.
Many times, “Map of Heaven” seems on the cusp of truly hitting home. Lowe peppers her story with cartographic metaphors (a notion nicely supported by David M. Barber’s map-centric scenic design), but her throughlines don’t always pay off. Scenes start to become quick and jaunty, and the final 20 minutes feel like a rushed exercise in forced exoneration.
As in any good play, a twist is introduced that’s meant to challenge our suppositions, perhaps even alter the course of our own way home. But the surprise we get doesn’t quite pass the smell test. And even if it did, it wouldn’t justify or explain away Ian’s choices, the ramifications of his actions or clarify why he might be deserving of forgiveness or understanding. And even if you do buy it, what we’re told just doesn’t match what we saw earlier in the play.
It feels like the playwright is letting Ian off the hook, as if to suggest that behaving unethically is less reprehensible than acting with outright negligence. Either way, it’s unacceptable. And with that point of view unsettled, we’re not sure if we should see Lena’s final response as an act of courage or compromise.
You want two things from any new play: That it be emotionally compelling and well-structured. By that score, “Map of Heaven” is halfway home.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
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“Map of Heaven” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Drama. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Ricketson Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Michele Lowe. Directed by Evan Cabnet. Through Feb. 26. 1 hour, 40 minutes with no intermission. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $10-$67. Recommended for ages 12 and up. 303-893-4100 (800-641-1222 outside Denver) or
