She enters muttering, as if speaking without pause were as necessary as breathing. All subjects are given the same weight in June’s rushing river of words: the death of her husband, chocolate peanut butter Easter eggs, her most recent surgery, the virtues of Lysol and the dubious hygiene of the people next door.
Played with unconquerable garrulousness by Elizabeth Dement in Christina Masciotti’s “Social Security,” at the Bushwick Starr, June is one of those souls who has nothing to say and never stops saying it. No matter that this newly widowed, retired pretzel factory worker is almost entirely deaf and lives alone. The conversation must go on.
You probably know someone like June, quite possibly within your own family. And you have probably determined that the best way to survive time in this person’s company is to tune out as completely as possible. But Ms. Masciotti would like you to keep your ears open, for once. This dramatist’s implicit thesis is that if you listen closely enough, there’s significant artistry in insignificant talk.
As in her earlier plays, “Vision Disturbance” and “Adult,” Ms. Masciotti mines the banalities of everyday chatter for heroic poetry. Set largely in working-class Pennsylvania, in towns forgotten by time, her uneventful dramas seem to be composed of what might be called “found conversation,” of words taken directly from life, with only minor cosmetic alteration.
This may sound like your idea of hell. But there’s a determined empathy in Ms. Masciotti’s work that enlivens the senses, making you realize that nothing and no one is boring — once you’re forced to pay close attention.
Directed by Paul Lazar with a cast rounded out by the avant-garde theater veterans Cynthia Hopkins and T. Ryder Smith, “Social Security” is both more conventional and experimental than Ms. Masciotti’s previous work. Its plot — and it has more of one than this writer usually provides — vaguely recalls a multitude of stories in which a vulnerable old woman is fleeced by a younger predator.
The wolf, in this case, is June’s landlord, Wayne (an enjoyably spasmodic Mr. Smith), a disgraced and self-medicating former podiatrist, who makes nice with his tenant while skimming from her Social Security payments. Another neighbor, the kindly Sissy (a warm and weary Ms. Hopkins), a Greek-born masseuse, tries to keep a lookout for threats to June’s well-being.
What suspense the story has comes from their half-formed battle of wills over an old woman’s destiny. June doesn’t seem to make moral distinctions between them. As far as she’s concerned, each is a set of ears of equal value, receptacles for her contentedly oblivious monologues.
The play’s story and speech may be naturalistic, but its staging is not. Sara C. Walsh’s set is divided into three stark, blank sections of beige carpet, well-worn linoleum and tiled fake wood, suggesting an anonymous wasteland of cheap housing.
The cast members move in ritualized, sometimes synchronized steps that evoke a sense of life as an instinctive and repetitive dance. Objects under discussion — like frozen TV dinners, bunches of bananas and a lone credit card — materialize on cue from the vertical louvers at the back of the stage. And there’s a gnatlike buzz of ambient noise (by the great sound designer Ben Williams), a blurry aural backdrop to all the talk.
Some of these theatrical elements are more distracting than illuminating. (It’s never a good sign when you realize you’re furrowing your brow over choices in staging.) But to my surprise, I remained absorbed by Ms. Masciotti’s logorrheic characters, especially June, whom Ms. Dement endows with a rapt self-involvement that is improbably free of narcissism.
June is not unlike that eternal chatterbox Winnie, buried up to her neck in sand in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days,” a person for whom there’s life as long there’s talk. June is, in her less symbolic way, as immobilized as Winnie is. And as her tongue keeps flapping, she, too, becomes an existential heroine of sorts, a life force that persists even as it shrinks into nothingness.
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