Kelly McAndrew and Keren Lugo in Stargazers. Photo: Valerie Terranova

We hear, several times in Majkin Holmquist’s Stargazers, about an oak tree on this Kansas property older than the United States. We never see it, but by the end of the play, we’re pretty sure it’s doomed; its deep roots in this soil won’t save it forever. The two central scenic elements in Page 73’s production Stargazers (directed by Colette Robert, with a set by Lawrence E. Moten III) are human-made, but also showing their age and probably not with us for long: a dilapidated barn–still standing, but showing its age, with a lean to one side and peeling paint and plenty of gaps between the boards–and a yard light, also a bit tilted and plagued by a recurring short that might be a ghost. The great-grandfather of Rita Olds (Kelly McAndrew) built the barn with his own hands. She doesn’t live on the land anymore, but she still pays someone to mow the lawn. It’s been abandoned, more or less, for nine years, but the high school kids still come to party in the spot called Stargazers. It’s land with a lot of meaning and a lot of local history, but it’s nobody’s home–and everyone in the play has ties to it that are fraught and hard to navigate, whether they miss the farm, want to buy the farm, want to farm the land, whether they feel weighed down by it or rooted in it. 

The press release for Stargazers notes Holmquist’s “desire to write a play from the perspective of a plot of land,” and the farm does feel like a central character, albeit a mute one, who serves as a reflection of the desires of all the humans in the piece. The other central character whose voice we never get to hear is Rita’s daughter, Cate, who died almost ten years ago in a horrific accident. Losing Cate broke up her marriage, it sent her and her husband, Al (Andrew Garman), off the Kansas farmland that’s been in Rita’s family for a century. She’ll be the first to admit grief made her a little crazy (exactly how crazy, we’ll find out later). Now, she’s got representatives from the Dedham Corporation, a real estate developer, with a plan for her land. Clementine (Lizzy Brooks), their earnest young representative, has a vision for a feminist utopian community, one she’s pitching on safety but really hopes can be a political outpost that will push Kansas in a progressive direction. (Her boss, it will turn out, has a different vision; feminism is too hard to market.) But how can she sell Rita on the safety of the land that took her daughter? And how can Rita ever feel at home there again? McAndrew situates Rita’s grief deep in her body, a weight she can’t escape; you feel the visceral, desperate comfort she takes in finding Cate’s ghost in the shorting yard light. 

Still, when Clem and Rita start to connect over a shared history of shattering grief, Rita starts to think maybe she should sell. Only she needs a huge, terrifying favor from one of her daughter’s friends first. After failing with Jess (Baize Buzan), Rita invites back the one friend who moved away: Aracely (Keren Lugo). The friends gather at their old party spot on the farm, which they call Stargazers. Aracely, who left for a place where you don’t see the stars, and doesn’t hate it, but maybe hates herself a little for not hating it. Casey (Miles G. Jackson), who works his dad’s farm, but can’t be honest with his family about his partner, Avery (Fernando Gonzalez), the high school coach. And Jess, who desperately wants to work her family farm but keeps getting passed over for her brothers; she can’t be the person she wants to be if she stays but she can’t if she leaves, either. 

Everyone’s a little stuck–including Al, who doesn’t want Rita to sell land he’s not allowed to occupy himself since the divorce, and Clem, who’s so close to getting her dream but then has to live in the community she’s made. Rita is the only one who can break them free–but in order to move on to something new, she needs to confess something awful she did in the extremity of her loss, and ask Cely to make it right. I don’t want to say any more about the details, because the monologue in which Rita tells this story is one of the most unsettling things I’ve seen in the theater in a long time, and both the narrative and McAndrew’s performance–and Lugo’s, in reaction–deserve to be experienced unspoiled. Suffice it to say that passing this torch is Rita’s way of saying goodbye to this place, preparing to hand it off to Clem while saddling Cely and Jess with a new burden.

Everything about this outcome is messy, though: Rita won’t get away safely; Clem thinks she’s getting what she wants but the forces of capitalism and “progress” and climate change (because how can you talk about a farm community in 2024 without talking about climate change?) are going to stand in her way; the town will lose its stargazing spot to a gated community. 

Stargazers is a messy play, in a good way: bristling with ideas and emotions, striving to paint a picture of a community in all its complexity without either romanticizing it or mocking it. It’s a bit of a messy production, too. The design elements work beautifully: Moten’s set takes the playing area off the Connelly’s proscenium space and literally embeds it on the ground, building a circle surrounded by sky. Reza Behjat’s lighting adds to the sense of nature and place, and Tosin Olufolabi’s sound design fills the scene transitions in a way that feels emotionally right. Robert’s staging is simple but elegant; it’s only when Clem’s company starts to bring in their road show at the end do you realize how intentionally economical people have been with movement till now. 

And yet, there are elements that don’t ring true. There’s a late-breaking tertiary subplot involving a construction worker (Gonzalez) and his feckless employee/sister-in-law (Buzan) that feels shoehorned in. And not all the relationships among humans are as well realized as the ones between these people and their community. 

The high school friends’ relationships with this place are complex and rich–more so than their relationships with one another, which don’t seem to have the depth of history. When Rita talks with Jess or Cely or Casey, we feel their shared roots; when the high school friends reminisce, their stories feel generic. When Cely talks about her complex relationship to the town–the one who got away but whose family is here; she doesn’t fit in in LA, but they don’t believe she, a Latina, is from Kansas either–it rings truer than when Avery talks about relating to teenagers as the coach or when Jess complains about her brothers. (Avery is supposed to be the outsider, but Gonzalez feels miscast. He doesn’t have the physical confidence of either a coach or the construction worker he also plays, and there’s no sense of intimacy between him and Jackson as a couple, whereas in Jackson’s doubled role, he’s Clem’s boss/secret lover, and there’s a jokey, fragile chemistry between Jackson and Brooks.)

But despite the loose ends and the uneven elements, it’s also a work of substantial power, tapping into a core of grief that is both personal—this family lost their daughter, their friend—and communal, because the sense of loss here is not just for Cate, but for a community, even a country. Aren’t we all searching for a sense of home in a world where even the planet seems to be trying to buck up and throw us off? Holmquist isn’t going to give us any answers–the idea of Cate’s ghost may bring some comfort to Rita or to Casey, but even if it’s real, it doesn’t fix anything. No one, with the exception of Clem’s glad-handing boss, Dedham (Garman again, the perfect smooth salesman), comes out of this better than they started, but a piece of prairie farm will be a “master planned community.” But for whom? Not the Olds family; not their neighbors. 

The house lights come up for Dedham’s closing pitch, delivered directly to and intentionally engaging with the audience, as if we New York theater-goers are the target market, the appreciators of “progress.” Maybe we are–but the human cost, at the end of this play, seems rather high.