The Last Five Years

The Last Five Years

Larry L. King Theatre at Austin Playhouse, through Jan. 18

Running time: 1 hr, 30 min

Love is not synchronized swimming. No amount of training or discipline or will will allow you to match your lover's movements through life the way you can another swimmer's through water.

One of you may pull ahead in the world or fall behind, and you can do little about it, just as you can do little when the feelings one of you has for the other change while the other's remain constant. You can't make your love go faster or slower. None of us can govern the pace of our hearts' beating.

That hard truth drives The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown's chamber musical that maps the relationship of Cathy and Jamie from beginning to end and end to beginning at the same time. In a novel structure, Brown starts with Cathy reading the note from Jamie that says he's leaving her just as Jamie, on the opposite side of the stage, arrives at her door for their first date. From that point, he moves forward in time while she slips backward, their love's rise and fall charted in alternating songs by the pair. It's a he-said-she-said approach but with a difference: This couple isn't debating a single event but giving us perspectives on their shared history from different moments in it. We're witnessing the entirety of their life together, all their dreams and realities, so that our focus is less on one person or moment than on this connection between them, the fragile bond that frayed and tore because these lovers were out of sync.

With no characters but Jamie and Cathy, The Last Five Years is by nature an intimate piece, but it's made more affectingly so in this production by Penfold Theatre Company and Austin Playhouse. In the 55-seat Larry L. King Theatre, we are so near the action that we might be sitting at the kitchen table in the couple's apartment (smartly appointed by designer David Utley). Every joy, every disappointment, registers in vivid, personal detail, some of them landing with the impact of an arrow to the chest. We're close to Jamie and Cathy in every sense of the word.

Proximity, however, isn't all that draws us to these two. The actors create distinctive, engaging personalities that not only establish the individual appeal of Cathy and Jamie but the love uniting them that we get to see so rarely. With the enthusiasm that fueled many memorable performances at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's graduate David Gallagher makes Jamie a go-getter intoxicated by his rising star as an author. It isn't that his Jamie is insensitive to Cathy's needs or insincere in his affections, but the rush of recognition, the assurance of his own creative powers, and success ultimately eclipse all else in his life, including, most unfortunately, his wife. Cathy is easier to relate to, starting, as she does, wounded, vulnerable, still struggling with her acting career, but Annika Johansson builds on that foundation with a rich emotional expressiveness in both her face and voice. She makes us feel the weight of frustration and heartache pressing down on her, and it's a pleasure to see, as Cathy's clock turns backward, the clouds clear from Johansson's face and her smile broadens and beams without reservation, without doubt.

What we know of Cathy's future leavens our delight with melancholy. She and Jamie have been – will be? are? – at cross-purposes, their lives moving at different rates, their hearts falling out of rhythm, like how many others in the world. You leave the theatre, an ache of a melody threaded through your chest, tribute to director and music director Michael McKelvey, who has crafted a tender, wistful anatomy of a relationship.