The Little Flower of East Orange

Stephen Adly Guirgis writes with an emotional intensity that bursts forth in anger, sorrow and biting humor. Well-known for his work Jesus Hopped the A Train, Gurgis' characters alternately cover themselves with street-harsh words and reveal their desperate agony to create a roller-coaster ride that is often loud and cathartic.

In The Little Flower of East Orange, a co-production by the LAByrinth Theater Company and the Public Theater, where the show is staged, Guirgis presents the relationship between an addicted son and his passive-aggressive, partially paralyzed and suicidal mother. Under the direction of LAB co-artistic director Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michael Shannon plays Danny, who narrates Little Flower as a series of flashbacks as he sits in jail after another relapse. When his mother goes missing, Shannon's Danny, alternately loving and bitter, abandons rehab with his perpetually high companion (played by Gillian Jacobs), to reunite with his mother.

Danny and his sister Justina, ably portrayed by Elizabeth Canavan who calls herself "the cold bitchy hysterical one who is also known as the only one who gets things done," find Therese Marie in a Bronx hospital after she tries to roll herself off a cliff in the Cloisters one night. While begging for scotch to ease her pain, Therese fakes amnesia so as not to bring her children to her bedside, wishing she were dead, or hoping to drink herself to death. When they finally find her, Justina panics at the thought her mother has died, but then screams what a bitch Therese is for trying to kill herself the one night Justina couldn't look after her. All three play the martyr to each other, all three jostling for the title of Greatest Victim, all seeking redemption from their anguished and co-dependent existence.

While never fully explored or explained, demons haunt mother, son and daughter all of whom feel they haven't measured up somehow - and never will. Their psychic turmoil throws them into strained interactions indicating undying love and utter misunderstanding. Danny taunts his mother in their final scene together, ultimately forcing her to admit that her deaf father's abuse caused her paralysis, but never revealing the causes of his own self-abuse.

From the vantage point of his jail cell from which he tells the story, Danny finds, at the end, his beginning and states, "let the state of incarceration do for me what I could not do for myself." And in this dead-end, where he cannot choose to leave like he did time and again when in rehab, and now after his mother's death finally sees "there is no precipice, no stopping point, no deluxe accommodations for martyrs. The only thing that stops you is death. Grace does not reveal itself to anyone who isn't looking for it...Grace is like the next breadth, it's always there."

Grace offers them acceptance - of themselves, of the ones they love, of the ones who have beat them down. It's theirs to accept, or go to their graves denying.