Indian Summer
by Gregory S. Moss
directed by Carolyn Cantor
Playwrights Horizon
June 19, 2016
Production website

💉💉💉 out of 5.

In that I teach high school, I am always concerned when a production begins with a teenager sitting on a mound of dirt emptying his shoes. I can just smell the expected angst and “teen issues” that the play will move toward. But I was surprised and delighted with Indian Summer. Essentially, the story is built around a teenage boy that has mysteriously been dumped off at his grandfather’s beach home for an indeterminate time. While sitting on the beach he becomes interested and then attracted to Izzy, a local girl that is clearly out of his league. This proves not to be easy in that Izzy has a boy already with all the tan and muscles that would prove him to be an obvious choice for Izzy.

This very predictable story that has been told a million times really seems fresh here. The young couple play some very interesting game of courting (such as the game where you pretend to meet some 10 years laters – after having married – and imagine your reunion dialogue). Blessedly the couple never got too insightful or too poetic. They remained teenagers.

The play did have a wonderful mellow afternoon at the beach feeling. You could imagine walking by these characters on the beach and wondering, just for a moment, “What’s their story?” The group of teenagers that I was with loved this play. They knew these people. Hell, some of them WERE these people.

I was most struck by the grandfather, a man who has recently lost his wife and finds his days busy with trying to get his grandson engaged in life (i.e. a date to see puppets and eat ice cream). The grandfather has some wonderful funny speeches and has a charm that works as the narrator for the story – but when the painful conclusion of the play happens the emotional punch really lands.

Indian Summer is that end-of-the-summer chance to capture all that perhaps the summer didn’t deliver. For me, the play was all about lingering – lingering in present joys for as long as one can before the seasons change – – making the most of the moments all the while knowing the moments are slipping through your hands. Lingering.