Brian D. Coates, Constance Shulman, Aya Cash, Frank Wood, Maureen Sebastian in The Best We Could. Photo: Courtesy Manhattan Theatre Club

Consider the typewriter. Introduced commercially in 1874, the machine was soon ubiquitous and essential, so much so that fifty years later it was hard to conceive the modern world without it. And yet by the end of the twentieth century, typewriters were on their way out, a useless relic of the past.

The struggle to avoid obsolescence is at the heart of Emily Feldman’s beautifully crafted and brilliantly realized new play, The Best We Could. The typewriter of the piece, Lou (Frank Wood), a once highly respected and now out-of-work biochemist, goes on a road trip with his equally adrift adult daughter, Ella (Aya Cash), to retrieve a dog Lou has adopted. The pairing has been arranged by wife and mother Peg (Constance Shulman), who wants her daughter, who has a job but not a career, to rescue her husband, who has a career but no job, from depression.

Feldman, director Daniel Aukin, and the design team very consciously borrow from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, utilizing a bare-bones set, work lights, even a Stage Manager-like character, Maps (Maureen Sebastian), who describes (or is it controls?) the action, occasionally dipping in to take on a role. True to her name, Maps guides Ella and Lou’s journey across America, occasionally interrupting the action with scenes from their past.

Lou’s suffering brings to mind another standard of the American theater canon, Death of a Salesman. Like Willy Loman, Lou defines himself by his work, so unemployment is more than an economic problem; it’s an existential crisis.  And though Lou is closer to his daughter than Willy is to his hapless son Biff, both men are equally befuddled by the generational gap that separates them from their children and the world that is passing them by.

But to portray The Best We Could as merely derivative of these two American classics is to do a disservice to this wholly original piece.  Where Our Town’s idealization of small-town life is easily sentimentalized, these unmistakably flawed characters defy romanticization. Although Peg assures us that everyone loves Lou, his interactions with women are sometimes squirmily uncomfortable. Ella, who has written a children’s book on giving up on your dreams, hasn’t actually given up but seems helpless to change her situation. And unlike Willy Loman’s wife, Linda, imperfect Peg unapologetically lies and manipulates her loved ones.

It would be simple to blame Lou’s troubles on the same unfeeling capitalist system that abandoned Willy Loman, but Feldman and Aukin don’t allow us an easy out. Frank Wood’s nuanced performance is both entrancing and alienating, ultimately making clear that Lou’s failure to adapt to the changing world is due to his own shortcomings. And Aya Cash’s wannabe nihilist Ella manages to convey vulnerability, love, anger, helplessness, and frustration, sometimes all at once. Both Constance Shulman as Peg and Brian D. Coats as Lou’s amiable colleague Marc also turn in strong performances, subtly conveying their characters’ sometimes complex, sometimes conflicting agendas.

But it is Maureen Sebastian’s unassuming Maps who anchors the show.  She pulls off the tricky Brechtian balance of presenting her narrator to create both an intellectual distance and empathy for the characters she assumes.  Like Matt Frey’s lighting, which at first appears to be simple rehearsal lights but gradually reveals a range of colors and complexities, Sebastian’s almost neutral reportage comes to mean a great deal more by the end of the show.  It is a testament to Aukin’s direction that every creative element is aligned in this way, at first appearing straightforward but gradually revealing layers that complicate all we’ve been watching.

Near the end of their journey, Lou and Ella get pulled over for speeding.  Maps as the police officer lets them off with words that sound like a warning, “You two take care of each other.” But like the inevitability of Emily’s death in Our Town and Willy Loman’s unavoidable downward spiral in Death of a Salesman—even like those typewriter-lovers among us who cling to our now obsolete Smith Coronas—the characters in The Best We Could are powerless to save one another.  Even Maps loses her ability to dictate others’ actions near the end of the play.  She gives Lou a variety of directions, but he stands rooted in place, unwilling, or unable, to carry them out.

Ultimately, everyone in The Best We Could is walking the tightrope between caring for those they love and the sometimes more difficult task of self-care and doing what they think is right.  No one can change what happens in the end (though Ella does try); that is the tragedy hinted at in the title.  But it would be a mistake to ignore what the rest of the title gets at: doing our best, for ourselves and those we love, is all we can do.