Gidion's Knot

The Bridge Repertory Theater of Boston concludes its freshman season with a two-person, 75-minute show that starts off unsteadily but then flies, arrow-straight, to the target.

"Gidion's Knot," a play from 2012 by Johnna Adams, exploits our fears and expectations. Like an illusionist, Adams allows us to think we're seeing one self-evident story until, with a flick of the wrist, she turns everything around. This play could be compared to a knot, yes, but also to a hall of mirrors where the moral compass receives only an intermittent tug from magnetic North.

Olivia D'Ambrisio stars as fifth-grade teacher Heather Clark, whom we first see sitting fretfully at her desk after class, a framed photo and her cell phone at the ready. When a woman barges into the room, trench coat flying, announcing she's there for a parent/teacher conference, a dance full of guilt, reluctance, compassion, grief, and anger begins.

The intruder is Corryn Fell (Deb Martin), the mother of one of Heather's students. At issue is why Corryn's son Gidion was suspended from school, and who beat him up after school on the day of his suspension. There's more: A slightly older boy named Jake has posted bullying messages on Gidion's Facebook page. But is this a standard incident of bullying? Or is more going on?

Naturally, it's the latter. Corryn, who is odd and sharp-tongued and brilliant, pieces together tiny clues that hint at a bigger picture than Heather is letting her see; for her part, Heather continually dodges and apologizes, unwilling to disclose details until the school's principal can arrive to join them. It all has to do with liability, admission, disclosure -- the standard stuff of a bureaucracy paralyzed by the fear of a lawsuit. But as the two women make connections, spar with one another, and even engage in a physical fray, the story spills out, each disclosure pointing at a different scenario until the final puzzles pieces fill in the story with a wrenching twist.

The actors play their characters like oil and water, and wrangle the script's not-entirely smooth beats. D'Ambrosio exudes self-possession, while Martin brings a blazing cerebral energy to the production; these are characters from two very different world-views, and that comes across under Karen MacDonald's direction.

Less clear are certain subtextual elements in Adams' script. The classroom is littered with references to mythology: A pair of golden, winged shoes bring Hermes to mind, for example, while a tiny statue of Ganesh sits on Heather's desk. Overhead, cardboard gods perch on paper clouds; pinned to the bulletin board, along with select stories written by the students, are posters detailing the gods and goddesses from various faith traditions. But what, exactly, is mythic about this story, knotty as it is?

The central metaphor is summarized in a poster created by a girl who has a crush on Gidion: A mass of tangled cord pasted to its center, the poster is titled "Gidion's Knot," and poses the question of whether the intricate, time-consuming task of untying the knot is preferable to simply cutting it. There are any number of social issues to which we might apply that very question; which ones does Adams have in mind, exactly? The overt issue of school bullying? The implicit questions of sex ed, institutional acceptance of sexual minorities, the problem of literacy rates, or even the rarefied issue of accessibility to high culture by generations that seem to shun complicated, multi-faceted disciplines as too boring, or not profitable in the pecuniary sense? One gets the feeling that all these questions are in play, but receive no clear idea of what Adams seeks to present as a possible solution, nor even a very clear delineation of which of the many questions she poses Adams would like to emphasize.

There's also the problem of the play's beginning, which is paced slowly, with recursive dialogue, as an opportunity for suspense and friction to build. They do -- but not to the degree one might hope for. This comes across as feeling more like extra padding in an already-brief production.

None of that matters when the play hits its stride, however, and the raw emotions called for in the writing boil over in the performance space. Nowhere are the intense, mixed feelings the play provokes as crystalline as the scene in which Clark reads Fell a story Gidion has written -- a beautifully composed piece that's also so horrific as to make "The Lord of the Flies" seem like an episode of "Downton Abbey."

Perhaps nothing makes parents so uneasy as the fear that their children will turn out to be alien to them, their thoughts and motivations indecipherable. (This is, no doubt, why the teen years are so traumatic for parents as well as adolescents.) But one thing might be worse than finding out you don't understand your own child: Discovering that you do understand, at least partly, but knowing that no one else is going to. When Corryn cries out to Heather the accusation that, as an agent of the school system, Heather's job is to stuff a unique mind into a conforming box and snuff its light, the crux of this play's most essential underpinning comes into view: Myth or poetry, fact or fantasy, any social order is continually challenged by a need for unity and an equal, opposing need for innovation. We gear our institutions for the masses, but require the spark of the outliers to drive progress; so what do we do with those outliers when they have to fit into institutions inimical to their very natures? How hard do we press for compliance, and when do we arrange for exceptions?

And what are the costs if we guess wrong and miss the mark?

"Gidion's Knot" continues through June 22 at the Boston Center for the Arts. For information and tickets, please visit bridgerepofboston.com