Wilson’s play turns Geri’s quest into a modern fable of the search for identity and for contact between cultures. This could have been deadly and portentous, and puddles of portent do slop up the going from time to time. But Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Talley’s Folly,” knows how to engage an audience while leading it to a real emotional payoff. The meeting between Geri and Lyman is a collision between Bigfoot and Bigmouth: she, desperately seeking Daddy, can’t stop talking. He has fled from a poisoned jungle to a pristine one. Inexorably, they come together.
The catalyst in this process is Geneva (Debra Monk), Geri’s adoptive aunt and a lumber tycoon (approved by the Sierra Club!) who’s just lost her 120-year-old firm to a hostile takeover that bodes ill for the redwoods. Geneva’s wisecracking sense of reality mediates between the two lost souls, and Monk’s performance is a masterly demonstration of high-IQ comedy. Geri must be adorable and irritating, an almost impossible feat that Cho valiantly wrestles to a near triumph. Daniels, like some reverse Frankenstein, has to rehumanize himself before our eyes, and he does this with poignant power. Marshall W. Mason, staging his 23d Wilson play, starts off with some clunky Big Feet of his own, but he knows Wilson like no one else and unerringly finds this playwright’s transporting note of lyrical realism.
