ANDREA PHOX
Arielle Goldman, left, and Ari Derambakhsh co-star in “The Bookstore” at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.
It would be an understatement to say that the lives of Abby and Brittany — two of the characters in Michael Walek’s play “The Bookstore,” which is currently having its world premiere at New Jersey Repertory in Long Branch, with direction by William Carden — revolve around books. A large percentage of their conversations with each other has to do with books they have or haven’t read, and authors, and authors’ personal lives.
“We’re going to end up spinsters, living together, crushed to death by our book collection,” Brittany tells Abby, early in the play. And you feel this prediction is right on the nose.
It is early 2017, and Abby (played by Arielle Goldman) and Brittany (Ari Derambakhsh) are working in a small, independent New York bookstore, vividly created on the NJ Rep stage by scenic designer Jessica Park. It is a welcoming space, but it doesn’t seem to generate much traffic; in every scene of this play, staff members outnumber customers.
ANDREA PHOX
From left, Quentin Chisholm, Janet Zarish, Arielle Goldman and Ari Derambakhsh in “The Bookstore.”
A young-and-innocent aspiring actor named Spencer (Quentin Chisholm) does come in one day, though, to escape a gay-bashing incident. He doesn’t stay long, but returns later to thank Abby, Brittany and the store’s owner, Carey (Janet Zarish), for helping him out.
He is not much of a book person: When asked to tell them the last book he has read, he says “Wuthering Heights” but then adds, “I didn’t read it as much as read the Wikipedia page.” But they turn him into a bibliophile, too, and he becomes a regular customer and then a close friend, expanding this family-like trio into a quartet. He eventually starts working at the store, too.
Abby is serious, Yale-educated and insecure. She participates in a writers’ group and wakes up at 5 a.m. daily to work on her novel before coming into the store. She won’t read mysteries; she seems to consider them beneath her. She says things like “My art comes first,” and doesn’t want Brittany to know that she has gone most of her life without reading Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.”
Brittany — who went to “a shitty college,” she says — is also a writer, but more casual about it, and far more interested in dating and partying than Abby. She is also more successful, as a writer, than Abby, which really gets under Abby’s skin.
Carey — who is a few decades older than these two, and something of a mother figure to them — is not a writer. But she has read just about everything there is to read, except James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake.” After she confesses to that lapse, she adds, “Sometimes you have to wait until you’re ready to read a book; there’s no shame in that.”
ANDREA PHOX
From left, Arielle Goldman, Janet Zarish and Ari Derambakhsh in “The Bookstore.”
She’s got a lot of wise sayings like that to share, when she’s not reminiscing about living in New York in the ’70s (“everyone had three martinis at lunch, an expense account, and coke in the top drawer; I only fucked guys who were up for the Nobel”) and dropping names like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Harold Pinter.
I wouldn’t tell you about this if it happened later in the play, but since it comes at the end of the first scene … in one of the fourth-wall-breaking segments that Walek occasionally includes, Carey’s higher-self addresses the audience directly, telling us something that the character doesn’t even know at this point in the play: She has terminal cancer, and will be dead by the end of 2017. “I am a ghost, but I don’t know it yet,” she says.
The cancer makes itself known, soon enough. And so these characters deal with that illness, and other issues, and talk about the books that are so important to them. They celebrate Thanksgiving together, at the store, with takeout food. Their commitment to the literary life comes to seem a bit brave, given how out of step it is with the world around them.
I can’t say there is much of a story here to get wrapped up in: To use a modern literary term, “The Bookstore” is not a page-turner. But it is sweet and touching in its own modest way, and builds to quite a memorable final scene.
New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch presents “The Bookstore” through Aug. 4. Visit njrep.org.
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