Cheryl Strayed’s 80-minute play “Tiny Beautiful Things” made its West Coast premiere at the Old Globe in 2019. Looking back, I it as funny, poignant and sometimes quite sad. The play is back this month in a new production by Scripps Ranch Theatre that’s so heartrending, the ushers offer free packets of tissues to audience when they arrive.
Sure enough, at the performance I attended last week many of those tissues were put to good use by the audience. That’s due, in part to the play’s honest and emotionally raw script, carefully calibrated direction by Kym Pappas that allows for stretches of potent silence, and fine performances by the talented four-member cast. It’s a tear-jerker of a show, but very well staged.
Author and podcaster Strayed is best known for “Wild,” her warts-and-all memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. But before “Wild” made her famous, Strayed spent two years working as the anonymous (and unpaid) author of an online advice column called “Dear Sugar.”
Without the academic credentials to offer therapeutic advice, Strayed instead responded to reader queries with eye-opening stories of how she dealt with similar experiences in her own life, including her use of heroin, surviving sexual abuse and committing infidelity and theft.
The questions readers asked range from silly (strange sexual fantasies) to heavier stuff about forgive one’s self, confessing to cheating and moving on from a bad relationship. Not all of Sugar’s answers were good advice, and some contradicted each other, but they provided a means of connection between flawed people trying to do better and be better. Strayed gathered the best of her columns in the 2012 book of essays “Tiny Beautiful Things,” which Nia Vardalos adapted into the stage play of the same name.
In the Scripps Ranch production, “Sugar” is played by Jyl Kaneshiro and more than a dozen of her letter writers are played by three actors: Max Macke, Michelle Marie Trester and Lisette Velandia.
Kaneshiro’s Sugar is cool, wise, still and emotionally detached in delivering her advice until the darkest and most shocking trauma of her past is tearfully revealed. Macke is exceptional at expressing profound grief as the letter writer “Living Dead Dad,” whose 22-year-old son was struck and killed by a car. Trester is quiet and tender as a bereft mom reeling from a miscarriage. And Velandia’s yearning and pain are palpable as they describe their family dynamics after transition surgery.
Dixon Fish designed the apartment scenic design, which the actors move quietly through, sometimes addressing Sugar, each other or the audience. Cassandra Crawford designed costumes, Carla Nell designed sound and Mitchell Simkovsky designed lighting.
“Tiny Beautiful Things” is a play for adults with mature subject matter. It’s sometimes tough going, but it’s an entertaining and moving play.
‘Tiny Beautiful Things’
When: 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 8
Where: Scripps Ranch Theatre at the Legler Benbough Theatre, Alliant International University, 9783 Avenue of Nations, San Diego
Tickets: $29-$49
Phone: 858-395-0573, scrippsranchtheatre.org
Online: scrippsranchtheatre.org
