Delfin Gökhan Meehan and Jason Bowen in Shakey Jake + Alice. Photo: Grace Copeland

There’s enormous restraint in the dramatic architecture of How Is It That We Live, or Shakey Jake + Alice, a new play by the downtown theater legend Len Jenkin. It’s a love story with an achingly, sometimes painfully slow burn; a love story whose ultimate tenderness is built on a foundation that’s more haunted and mournful than it is joyful or passionate. The play maps a relationship via individual scenes at three key moments: Jake (Fred Weller) and Alice (Kate Arrington) at eighteen, mid-thirties, and an unspecified many years later, when Jake is dying. (Arrington and Weller themselves are none of these ages, but in their forties and fifties, physically situated in the unseen time in between scenes 2 and 3.) At every turn, a dangerous fate intervenes, threatening to part them, or just toy with their lives–and yet they find their way back to each other every time.  

But we see this relationship at a remove from the beginning, their story framed through the narration of two “Speakers” (an older man and a younger woman, played by Jason Bowen and Delfin Gökhan Meehan respectively), who also step into the story as Fates. If Jake and Alice are very ordinary Midwesterners–Alice a former cheerleader and Jake a rough-around-the-edges bad boy who eventually joins the military in an attempt to settle down–the Speakers are something else entirely, and their unsettling presence gives the piece an unsettling energy that Jake and Alice don’t carry in and of themselves. Bearers of a doomed love story (or series of them) of their own, these two wear many guises and many darkly whimsical names–Clarence Nightingale and Sweet Lucy; Evangeline and Snake Hips and Little Sister–and there’s a whiff of brimstone and chaos whenever they’re around. The poetry of Jenkin’s language, as much prose as dialogue, rests here, and Bowen and Meehan embody its haunted slipperiness beautifully, as these characters slip in and out of time and spin yarns that are neither truth nor lie but something else entirely. Director Aimée Hayes has a sure grip on the differences of tone baked into the levels of reality; nothing in this play is ever entirely realistic, but Clarence and Snake Hips and Lucy are clearly not operating on the same plane as Alice and Jake. 

When we meet them at eighteen, Alice is about to leave their midwestern hometown and Jake’s a troubled troublemaker with no particular plans. They’re enjoying a slightly forbidden love–or at least a romance disapproved of by her parents, though neither of their parents seem like a particularly stable or supportive family–and sheltering under a bridge from a summer storm under a bridge. She’s got college in her sights; he’s got a cool car and no plan. And they’re not really sure what holds them together; as Alice says, “You mix me up and make me crazy / make me forget everyone else / everything else / but you don’t make me happy, Jakey.” There’s already something elegiac about the way they talk to each other; their relationship is still going on, but both Arrington and Weller connect with a ruefulness that feels like they’re always already mourning their relationship. “‘I’ll remember you,” she says, “last thing before the lights go out.”

And then they part, for fifteen long years, in which Alice goes to college and graduate school, marries and has a child and divorces, and somehow winds up back in their hometown by the time Jakey comes looking. He’s held many jobs for short whiles, drunk too much, spent four years in the military in Honduras, and is more or less homeless when he turns up at Alice’s door on Christmas Eve. She’s not ready to forgive him, but now he’s ready to make the promise of eternal remembrance that she gave to him the last time they parted. And here are the Fates again, stepping in and meddling in theirs. This time, it turns out, he’s going to stay till the bitter end–until the Little Sister who is the embodiment of Death comes back into their lives to bring him to his final rest.

The production is simple–befitting the small space–but elegant and carrying its own witchy magic. The key element on Alexander Woodward’s set is a giant, naturalistic tree limb overhanging the entire playing area, which twinkles with Christmas lights at the appropriate season. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting and John Kilgore’s sound design work with the Speakers in symbiotic ways to set time and place. And Clare Lippincott’s costumes underline the contrast between Alice/Jake, dressed in ordinary neutrals and pastels, and the more otherworldly figures, who wear rich reds and velvet coats.

Whatever it is that keeps drawing Alice and Jake back together, it’s not passion: from the beginning, there’s little heat between Arrington and Weller. They’re drawn to each other–or pushed together–but even they often seem baffled or bemused by their bond. It’s as if they’re so broken before they start that they hold each other up more than find joy together. At eighteen, this dynamic is baffling; at thirty-something, you start to root for forgiveness; and by the final scene, their simple, unadorned bond is genuinely touching. Which is in keeping with the mission of The Tent Theater Company–to support and advocate for the work of Elder American playwrights. Here, we see the richness that age can bring to these characters, as well. 

How Is It That We Live may not reach the heights of inspired weirdness of some of Jenkin’s earlier work–Soho Rep’s production of his Dark Ride was a deeply formative theater experience for me–but it does draw from the same well of mystery. Alice and Jake’s love story did end up moving me, but it’s Clarence and Snake Hips–and the performances of Bowen and Meehan–that will stick with me.