If you’ve ever been a middle-school girl whose best friend drifted away (maybe because she became interested in boys and you didn’t, or she got sucked into the popular crowd and her values seemed to change), then you can identify with Suzy, the central character in Ali Benjamin’s young-adult novel “The Thing About Jellyfish,” which is now a beautifully stage-designed world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
The theatrical adaptation, written by Keith Bunin and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is lots more than just a story about a precocious girl whose former bestie, Franny, suddenly drowns when they’re in seventh grade. Unpopular Suzy (she talks too much and doesn’t try to fit in) is left with unanswered questions about the ways of the universe. Franny was an ace swimmer. How could she drown? wonders Suzy. There must be a logical explanation!
Suzy is also left wracked with guilt for something she did to Franny in fifth grade.
But there’s more here than a tale of a childhood friendship that ends in tragedy. In her quest to find an answer to the lingering question of how and why Franny drowned, brainy Suzy has stopped talking entirely and, emotionally isolated from schoolmates and parents, vows to figure it all out.
She gloms onto a theory. Franny was stung by a jellyfish. “Things don’t just happen for no reason,” Suzy reasons, and it’s a long, emotional journey for her to learn not just about science but also about living with the known and the unknown.
Suzy’s theory leads her into an imaginative world of her own, in which she immerses herself in a study of jellyfish with the help of online authorities—and ultimately an avuncular Australian deep-sea diver—some of whom may or may not be products of her own imagination.
What stands out in this production is not so much Suzy’s at times labored quest but rather the scenic design (by Derek McLane, with lights by Lap Chi Chu).
A stage initially clean and empty, bordered by floor-to-ceiling glassy, framed panels, morphs into an ever-changing visual environment: floating jellyfish of all sizes, color-saturated abstract patterns, computer data that Suzy is studying, a breathtaking forest, the cosmos and more. So entrancing are these masterful projections that it makes you wonder if old-fashioned stage design will eventually be extinct.
As Suzy, Matilda Lawler is fairly credible as a kid at various stages of her life, but with only two forms of expression: during her post-traumatic I-refuse-to-talk scenes, she’s tight-lipped while staring into the eyes of her scene partners, but registers nothing more than blank-faced intensity; otherwise, she’s chattering nonstop, about everything she thinks and knows and discovers and feels, in the way that creative, hyperactive kids can do, but it grows wearisome.
However, Kayla Teruel’s lithe little Franny is particularly expressive and convincing, and terrifically graceful, at the various ages she plays, and Christiana Clark, in several roles—including a terrifying science teacher, an obsessive long-distance swimmer, Franny’s grief-stricken Mom—is positively brilliant. And gangly Robert Stanton as the Australian underwater expert who helps Suzy understand the elusive jellyfish, and other, more important concerns, is a delight.
At bottom, though, Benjamin’s novel is a children’s book. You’ll learn lots about jellyfish (apparently they’ve been around for 600,000,000 years!), you’ll be dazzled by the beauty of the design, you’ll likely identify to one degree or another with Suzy, you’ll have some existential ideas to consider. But the whole story feels simplistic. Beautifully rendered and well-acted, “The Thing About Jellyfish,” like its title, seems like a play for children.
“The Thing About Jellyfish” runs through March 9 in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $25 to $134 at berkeleyrep.org.
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