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Nope. In telling her story about a fundamental shift in the ethos of popular music, Eason, best known in New York for writing Sex With Strangers, which premiered at Second Stage last year, reinforces the sobering notion that even progress has a limited lifespan. Hank is so committed to always doing the next thing—he loathes nostalgia and rants endlessly about a recent backward-glancing newspaper profile—that he's lost his ability to determine what the next thing is. So when it arrives in the form of Nash (Daniel Abeles), a hot up-and-coming warehouse DJ who fall's for Hank's daughter Lena (Margo Seibert) and cut his teeth and his love for music at Hank's once upon a time, his first instinct is to reject and run. Eason spends most of her 95-minute play showing why that's perhaps not the wisest response, and why "change or die" may be the blade that kills long-time survivor Hank professionally. She does this with skill and clarity, even if the "villain," Joey Kaczmarek (Chris Kipiniak), the no-nonsense son of the once-upon-a-time agreeable landlord, is sketched with strokes a bit too broad (he offers to cut a deal for the building if Lena will sleep with him, among other things). But the play is essentially excitement-free; there's not a lot of suspense to elicit from the situation, as the dramatic deck is constantly stacked in one direction, and possessing even a cursory knowledge of the rock scene in the last 20 years is enough for you to know who won the fight in real life. More engaging are the interpersonal stories behind the scenes that describe the price of obstinacy from multiple viewpoints: Lena trying to juggle a relationship with the aggressively ambitious Nash over her father's disapproval; the attempts of Hank's ex-wife, Bette (Lusia Strus), to remain a part of his and Lena's life even after she moves out of their home; low-rung employee Toby (Brian Miskell) pining away for Lena, even as it becomes increasingly clear their one-time thing will not become permanent; and the offstage scuffling between Joey and his father (whom we don't meet) about the outcome of Hank's establishment, another instance of the way the tensions between the past and the future bleed into these people's everyday existence. Kirsten Kelly's staging on John McDermott's excellent, comfortably cluttered backroom-bar set is sure if seldom rich, and the actors have dug deep to find the most heated passions and short fuses that will help things spark to life. Seibert, who made a splash last year starring in the Broadway musical Rocky, does the best, making Lena immensely likable but also unforgiving (she's quite obviously Hank's daughter). But everyone except Kipiniak (he tries his best, but is unable to escape the confines of Joey's schematic writing) is terrific at letting us see how their characters toe the line between the ever-shifting definitions of alternative and mainstream, in their work and their emotional lives. It's a difficult dance, to be certain, and not one without casualties; Eason makes abundantly clear that every decision everyone makes has a cost, something that proves to be good fuel for getting the play past the duller moments that are concerned with facts we can ignore (even if the people onstage can't). That's why, on some level, it doesn't much matter that so little in The Undeniable Sound of Right Now is new. Change is the only thing that stays the same from era to era, and we always have to cope with it even if the most eagle-eyed among us can't see it coming (and they often can't), and Eason's play points the way to, if nothing else, a strategy for making the best of a situation that's rarely what anyone involved wants.
The Undeniable Sound of Right Now
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