The curtains at the Jungle Theater open on a serene scene as Christina Baldwin sits Buddha-style onstage, facing us with eyes closed. She opens them to see an audience staring hungrily at her. But she's not ready yet. So, calmly, she turns her back to us and continues to meditate.
Suddenly, she is roused by the cry of her waking toddler.
This understated, charmingly self-possessed bit of stage business telegraphs the journey we take in "The Oldest Boy," the sweet, spirit-filled Sarah Ruhl play that had its regional premiere Friday in Minneapolis.
Big questions swirl in small gestures in this 2014 work, which nominally is about parental attachment and letting go. Director Sarah Rasmussen's elegantly evocative production invites us into different ways of seeing ourselves and our world.
Baldwin plays Mother, a white woman married to a Tibetan restaurant owner named Father (Randy Reyes). Ruhl makes these characters archetypal, as if to nod to other religious systems.
Father is at work when the doorbell rings. A lama (Eric "Pogi" Sumangil) and a monk (Tsering Dorjee Bawa) have come for a visit. They believe the couple's 3-year-old son is the reincarnation of their lama, or spiritual teacher. They wish to take away the Boy (a puppet manipulated by Masanari Kawahara) so he can grow up in a monastery to live out his spiritual destiny.
In a wistful performance, Baldwin registers the honor of giving birth to a child considered an exalted spiritual teacher and the horror of potentially losing that child. She expresses Mother's anguish in suppressed sighs and brimming, glassy tears that don't quite spill.
The same deep feelings mark Reyes' Father, who fights his emotions more effectively, but betrays them nonetheless. In his crisp delivery, he's like a man conflicted in battle. He struggles vividly between religious and parental duty, all the while cratering on the inside.
