Review: A battered family finds strength in ‘The Salvagers’

Harrison David Rivers’ gracious new drama, “The Bergers”, is not a romance, but it is emphatically a love story: about an angry, sad young actor and his imperfect parents, who steadfastly try to help him heal.

At 23, Boseman Salvage Jr. wasn’t meant to be. only to find himself back in snowy Chicago, where he grew up and where his parents separated while he was in college. He certainly had not intended to move in with his father, whom he loathes with a smoldering, adolescent contempt. But after an episode where Boseman Sr. obliquely referred to as “your cry for help,” Boseman Jr. At home.

In the world premiere of Mikael Burke op Yale Repertory TheaterTaylor A. Blackman is a blistering young Boseman – self-loathing, self-harming and terribly lost, but with such a huge chip on his shoulder that hostility could easily be all his father sees.

Yet Boseman Sr., played by the strong Julian Elijah Martinez, is stability itself. He is not the soul of patience – who could be, with such an irritable adult child in the house? – but he’s not going anywhere. And he will encourage his son to take his pills, cooking him multi-course meals night after night for as long as it takes to restore him to sanity. (The suggestion of a homely interior, with a huge glacier mountain above, is by B Entsminger.)

An important detail about Boseman Sr., a locksmith, and Nedra (Toni Martin), his mailman’s ex-wife: he was only 14 and she was only 16 when they met Boseman Jr. got. But their son’s torments have their roots elsewhere, entangled in notions of filial inheritance and parental expectations—as if, by virtue of sharing his father’s name, he is meant to be a duplicate of him. In that case, homosexuality, which Boseman Jr. cannot give in, is seen as a failure in his own eyes.

The loving, outgoing Nedra, who can recite her son’s audition monologue “King Lear” in unison with him (including his “Hamlet”), already sees her child for who he is. When he tells her he’s met a woman, she blurts out her surprise: “Is your person a she?”

That would be Paulina (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew), the least organically written of the main characters. Blackman and Bartholomew never even find the boyfriend-girlfriend energy for the relationship, the only overdeveloped part of the script.

Much more magnetic is the crush between Boseman Sr. and Elinor (McKenzie Chinn), a substitute teacher he meets when she locks herself out of her apartment. Martinez and Chinn have an appealing chemistry, and Chinn manages the delicate task of keeping Elinor sympathetic even as she greatly oversteps the mark, uncovering secrets that will keep Boseman Jr. must reconsider its own history.

Rivers sometimes pushes too hard, as when characters twice express confusion about the practicalities of two people in the same family having the same name—not exactly unheard of.

What he does, however, with enormous dexterity, is show us a family, ravaged by pain, that through dedication and forgiveness no longer wants to fall apart. It’s good that the Salvages can restore them all by caring for each other and getting cared for.

The Bergers
Through December 16 at the Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Playing time: 1 hour and 50 minutes.