High school reunions are forever days of reckoning, and in “Flyovers,” Jeffrey Sweet’s new play at Victory Gardens Theater, two smalltown Ohio schoolmates, now middle-aged, duke it out, both figuratively and literally.
They are that inimitable pair, the geek and the bully, the `A’ student and the party animal, the success story and the loser. Oliver (Marc Vann) is one of a syndicated TV twosome of dueling movie critics, with just enough celebrity sheen to enable him to come home for a bout of all-out revenge of the nerd. In contrast, Ted (William Petersen) shone at high school beer busts, but never again. “You like movies with subtitles,” he tells Oliver in his own brand of critique. “I don’t have a career,” Ted smirks. “I work.”
In fact, Ted doesn’t even do that. This town has lost its main factory, and Oliver’s homecoming triumph proves too all-encompassing to bear. Ted’s wife, Lianne (Linda Reiter), is emotionally shattered by the economic downturn and the recent death of her father. During a back yard gathering after the reunion, Oliver offers to buy a useless collector’s stamp as a seeming act of kindness, one Ted suspects is more like pity.
Another schoolmate, Iris (Amy Morton), whom Oliver uselessly lusted for way back when, arrives too — she’s another washout, an unmarried mother whose daughter now has a child herself. She and Ted clearly plan to do more than just get reacquainted with Oliver. They desperately need money and hope their rich friend will prove a victim just one more time.
Sweet, veteran playwright of the off-Loop’s own glory days (“Porch,” “Ties,” “The Value of Names”), delivers here a satisfying comedy-drama layered with polarities. This is a battle between two ’90s Americas, that of the harried, cell phone, pocket-organizer set and the disenchanted labor force, whose jobs keep moving to the likes of Malaysia.
Though unapologetically schematic, “Flyovers” (the name refers to Ted’s putdown of people who jet from coast to coast and ignore the land in between) beautifully mixes laughs and lessons. While funny, it’s also a faithful tone poem on its characters, who end up dissected, desperate, and, in Sweet’s strange, deftly managed plot twists, stranded in a dreary, Flannery O’Connor-like neverland of an ending.
Best of all, “Flyovers” is a performance reunion, too, for Petersen, who hasn’t played on stage here since 1994, and former fellow Remains Theatre ensemble member Morton, with whom he acted in more than 20 shows over the years. Together with Vann, one of the finest actors of a later generation, masterfully directed by Dennis Zacek, they revel in this play’s easy realism, startling explosions and bursts of heartbreaking insight.
Oliver tells Ted he came home to prove that he’d escaped the bounds of “what you thought I was in high school.” In Sweet’s even-handed reckoning, the bounds for these characters come from inside, and the escape is just a flyover to nowhere.
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“Flyovers”
When: Through June 28
Where: Victory Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Phone: 773-871-3000
