Philadelphia Theatre Company presents James Ijames’s Wilderness Generation

Directed by PTC co-artistic director Taibi Magar, Wilderness Generation follows four cousins who return to their grandmother’s house after many years away: siblings Smitty (Brenson Thomas) and Ramona Maxim (Heather Alicia Simms), as well as Nicole (Jessica Johnson) and Micah (Lindsay Smiling), the black sheep of the family. They ostensibly come to help Grandma Bobbie pack her belongings, but upon arriving, realize that she has left on a church group vacation. The cousins are left to sort through the boxes and their childhood memories, their alternate echoes of joy and pain.

Oddly muted drama

Putting a family in a room until old wounds must inevitably rear their heads is a classic setup in American theater, but here, the drama is oddly muted. Much of this stems from the play’s treatment of the central family trauma, telegraphed so explicitly from the first scene that it feels as though there must be some late-act twist. (Spoiler alert: There isn’t.) The cousins share the burden of said trauma, perpetrated by Micah’s father all those years ago, but Micah’s father is a specter outside of the play, rather than an active force within it. Where other Ijames scripts bring their protagonists face-to-face with that which haunts them, often in the form of literal ghosts, there is no such catharsis here.

This is part of the play’s thematic import, that we are inevitably left to clean up our parents’ messes, but rarely does that conflict feel alive in the children. Initially, the play seems to offer Micah as a conduit for his father’s evils; Nicole, flustered with memory, threatens to leave when she learns he’s on his way. But Micah’s arrival doesn’t precipitate much beyond a few awkward greetings, almost pointedly so. Texturally, he’s rougher around the edges—Smiling imbuing the part with an earthly humanity—but he’s also deeply attentive to Nicole’s feelings, constantly asking the others if his being there is okay. He alludes to a rough couple of years, but truthfully assures the others that that’s all in the past now. Good for Micah, but there’s not much tension if the play’s most complicated character shows up with all his shit figured out. The pain of the past lingers, but there is no fundamental disagreement before us, no sense of stakes or revelation.

Technical faults, entertaining scenes

Magar’s flat direction magnifies the play’s dramatic faults, emphasizing bland comedic delivery and conveying little visual sense of the cousins’ variety of interpersonal dynamics. The set, designed by Matt Saunders, is realistic but visually boring, often pushing the cast into a downstage clump; the broad lighting by Thom Weaver imparts the sense of a live sitcom taping. Twice, the action leaves the house and expands to the roof, but the rooftop actors appear awkwardly crammed into the frame, so close is the platform to the proscenium’s edge. An occasional blare of a marching band afar attempts to provide some diegetic realism, but the noise is mostly a distraction.

Technical faults notwithstanding, the play often entertains on a scene-by-scene basis, where Ijames’s penchant for lived-in banter is on full display. The sibling dynamic between Smitty and Ramona is delightfully animated by Thomas and Simms, trading barbs about each other’s drinking habits and dating lives. Donovan (Abdul Sesay), Nicole’s boyfriend and an aspiring rapper, provides both comic relief and an outsider’s perspective on the Maxim family dynamic. Another scene, the play’s finest, features Smitty and Micah bonding on a couch bed, each considering their place within the family unit. When the two connect over their mutual alienation—Smitty as a child hiding his queerness, and Micah struggling with a rebellious streak—it strikes a quintessential Ijames note. (Catch our latest BSR Podcast interview with Ijames here.)

Avoiding the weight of trauma

On the whole, these touches aren’t enough to save the play from its hollow dramatic setup. When it comes time to bring family secrets into the light, the conflict is resolved with some shouting and then some hugging. That may sound glib, but absent genuine tension, there can be no truly satisfying resolution. Outro music plays, and a corny snapshot of the family is projected overhead, carrying with it the saccharine falsity of a Hallmark movie.

It would be nice if it were so easy to hug out generational trauma, but it’s a sentiment that circumvents the full weight of trauma, and we’re left to wonder if the family portrait looks any better than it did before.