Country Club’: Life of the restless privileged

By Andrea Estrada

South Coast Beacon

Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays, as the Christmas carol declares, and five WASP 20-somethings take that notion to heart all through the year in Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of “The Country Club, an award-winning social satire by contemporary playwright Douglas Carter Beane, The play, which opened Dec. 5, at the Alhecama Theatre, has received the Los Angeles Times Critics’ Choice and Dramalogue honors.

The action takes place in the Cub Room of the hoity-toity Wyomissing Pennsylvania Country Club, where the grown but not quite grown-up group of friends gather for New Years Eve and then some. As the play continues, the friends celebrate 10 other holidays and special occasions, all in the Cub Room and none of which going off entirely as planned.

“It’s about a group of young people who inherit the life of the country club,” guest director Peter Lackner said about the play. “They’re born into the American Dream and they’re asking themselves, ‘If you already have it, where do you go from there?’ ”

Meg Brogan, a veteran of Ensemble Theatre Company productions, plays Soos, the young, witty and slightly neurotic woman who flees from California to her hometown in Pennsylvania following the break-up of her marriage. Fellow cast members include Anna De Nersesian, Jamison Haase, Nancy Nufer, Mark Johnson, Aaron Levin and Abigail Rose Solomon.

Back in Wyomissing, Soos meets up with her old circle of friends, a collection of rich and privileged suburban preppies nicknamed Pooker, Froggy, Hutch, Bri and Zip, who happens to have been Soos’s high school sweetheart.

“There are actually a lot of people growing up in America who are growing up in affluent households and feel a sense of despair when they reach young adulthood because they haven’t had anything to fight for,” said Brogan. “If you’re given everything at the outset and there’s nothing to strive for, there’s going to be a sense of dissatisfaction.”

Such is life for the “haves” of the country club scene.

“It’s kind of a reality check,” added Lackner. “They retreat into the Cub Room, where they hung out as children and adolescents, because they’re afraid of tackling life.”

Over the course of the year in which the play takes place, the group begins asking some serious questions as some move toward real adulthood while others fight it tooth and nail.

Producing the play during the Christmas season makes sense, he said, because “you have two real holidays.” said Lackner.

“Life is a party during the holiday season, but what are we celebrating?”

In an age when most families depend on dual incomes simply to survive and some folks work two or even three jobs to put food on the table, finding sympathy for the silver-spooned who complain about their own isolation might be challenging. According to Brogan, however, this experience is common to most people on some level.

“I try to look back on how I felt in my late 20s and I felt a little lost and a little unhappy and not knowing my place in the world and not knowing how to make a difference. And I think those feelings are universal and very human,” she said. “Also, it’s interesting because sometimes I feel when I’m playing a role like this my job is not to judge the character but simply to be the character.”

“The Country Club” continues through Jan. 4, 2004 with performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays.