Michael Colby Jones and Mairin Lee (photo: Mike Peters)
When Tammy Ryan's play Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods had its world premiere at Premiere Stages in 2010, it had an encouraging critical reception ( review) that was further rewarded when it won the Francesca Primus Prize for Playwriting given by the American Theater Critics Association.
It's story about one of the seventeen thousand boys who fled Sudan during the Civil War of 1980 to escape the brutality was finely dramatized by Ryan with heartfelt compassion. Now we are again able to get immersed in another drama by this splendid playwright, this time for its New Jersey premiere.
Ryan brings a heart-wrenching experience into alignment with the blisteringly traumatic aftershock of rape as it applies to a thirty year-old Sergeant in the Marines Casey Johnson (Mairin Lee). Casey is, to use the old phrase, gung ho and looking forward to her first deployment to Iraq. It is September 2006. Raised in a military family, patriotic to its core, and ultra organized, she displays a strong sense of duty as well as the independence and confidence that allows her to raise her ten year-old son Sean (Azlan Landry). This, with only minimal help from her ex Marine/ex husband Kevin (Benton Greene), with whom she shares custody.
Just as Casey has come to terms with the disintegration of their marriage due in large part to Kevin's prolonged and difficult recovery from post-traumatic-stress disorder, she is now about to be almost completely dependent upon her mother Margie (Kim Zimmer), an ex alcoholic who works at Foodland, for taking care of her son Sean in her absence.To read the entire review please go to http://curtainup.com/soldiersheartnj14.html
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