Powerful ‘Tide’ flows into the human heart

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Thomas J. Cox, (from left), John Mahoney and Rondi Reed in "The Outgoing Tide."

Updated: June 6, 2011 12:10PM

Two reasons to love Chicago theater? Rondi Reed and John Mahoney.

As for the prospect of both Tony winners on stage together in a world premiere? This is reason for celebration.

The powerhouse pair don’t disappoint in “The Outgoing Tide,” a riveting world premier drama that’s impossible to look away from even as it relentlessly delves one of the most terrifying — and perhaps terrifyingly inevitable — elements of human life.

That’s the prolonged end of it, as drawn out by the almost inconceivable cruelties of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, afflictions that rob you of mind and memory, while keeping you tragically cognizant of all that you’re losing.

The struggle for retired union negotiator Gunner (Mahoney) isn’t so much against the inexorably escalating symptoms of the disease, although his daily battle to find the basic vocabulary words that keep slipping his mind and to cope with the frustration of mistaking the microwave for the television is intense, ongoing and enraging.

The real war for playwright Bruce Graham’s flawed, exasperating and endearing hero lies in coming to terms with Gunner’s harrowing future: He is becoming a vegetable, Gunner realizes.

Soon, he won’t recognize his wife of 50 years. His lifetime of work, friendships and family will be erased. He’ll be warehoused, diapered and forcefed alongside other mute, empty husks who were once vibrant, complex and self-sufficient people, He’d rather die, rails Gunner.

Gunner’s wife Peg (Reed), has other plans, primarily finding an assisted living facility where they both can live and she can get some desperately needed relief from the rigors of caring for someone who is slowly, surely regressing to a second infancy.

So the stage is set for a wrenching drama of dwindling options, twilight years, and encroaching, unstoppable tragedy.

If that makes “The Outgoing Tide” sound relentlessly grim, we’ve done this exquisitely acted gem a grave disservice. Directed by BJ Jones, the piece is bitingly funny. The humor isn’t the gentle comedy ingénues and pretty young things, but the sharp-edged, hard-won wit of a couple that’s been around the block more than a few times, and whose deep understanding of life’s oh-so-many bleak absurdities informs creates a pathos at once wise, rueful and instantly recognizable.

This is the humor of maturity and experience, absolutely nailed in a pair of performances that simply wouldn’t be possible from less well-seasoned actors.

The third player in “The Outgoing Tide” is the invaluable Thomas J. Cox, who plays Peg and Gunner’s son. In mid-divorce, he’s visiting for a weekend and burdened with his own roster of personal crises.

Having secluded this trio in Gunnar and Peg’s lake house, Graham proceeds to rip open ancient family wounds and unpack disturbing family secrets while parents and son try to figure out how to deal with their uncertain future.

Graham’s opening scene is shocking, although you don’t realize it until the final moments. If wouldn’t do to give too much away, but the opening gambit of dialogue ends with a barb to the heart that completely upends your perception of everything that’s happened and is startling enough to be gasp-inducing.

It also succinctly, powerfully lets the audience know just how dire the situation has become for Peg, Gunnar and son.

Mahoney has never been better. He’s both bullying and loving, a tough old cuss whose decidedly old-school attitudes toward his wife and child straddle — as so many close family relationships do — a complex line that’s constantly vacillating between love and hate (or at least, love and dislike).

Reed, hair turned a dowdy gray and dressed in shapeless housedresses, depicts a long-suffering but strong-minded housewife whose lifelong compromises haven’t diminished the rock-solid dedication she has to the man she fell in love with at as a schoolgirl.

As the third point in the family triangle, Cox ably captures the all-but impossible position of a son pulled in two diametrically opposed directions by parents who each demand loyalty.

In the end, “The Outgoing Tide” is both steeped in sadness and the hope that comes from finding power in a situation that seems to render one powerless.

If you’ve got aging parents or are entering the final third of your own life, “The Outgoing Tide” will no doubt be intensely difficult to watch at time. But it is also the sort of production that’s a straight-up gift to audiences: a fantastic script, brilliantly realized and going straight for the heart.