Don’t Give Up the Ship is a new script with rich potential, well worth the time of audience members seeking exciting, unconventional theater.

Don’t Give Up the Ship by Laura Neill. Directed by Joshua Glenn-Kayden. Staged by Fresh Ink Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, through February 26.

Alex Alexander as Diana in the Fresh Ink production of “Don’t Give up the Ship.” Photo: courtesy of Fresh Ink.

By Erik Nikander

When the stage goes dark at the opening of Fresh Ink Theatre’s world premiere production of Laura Neill’s play Don’t Give Up the Ship, the audience is washed over by a wave of sound. The audio landscape crafted by sound designer Andrew Duncan Will transports us to the seaside, where waves crash around us and sails flap in the breeze. The sensation is so vivid and lifelike that you almost expect to taste the salt of the sea spray. The fantasy world created by the company can’t help but bleed through into the confines of reality.

This moment is a fitting introduction to the play as a whole, in which the boundary between the real and the imagined is in constant flux. When Diana (Alex Alexander) falls into a coma after a boating accident, her ex-husband Jeff (Robert Cope) reads to her from a book on the life of naval hero Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. After emerging from the coma, Diana believes she is Perry, and every aspect of her life is filtered through this strange delusion; her grown daughters Martha and Olive (Tonasia Jones and Louise Hamill, respectively) become her loyal lieutenants, and she sees Jeff as her four-year-old son. Lizzie (Hayley Spivey), the nurse hired by Martha and Olive to tend to their mother, inadvertently takes on the crucial role of Perry’s beloved wife, Elizabeth Champlin Mason.

Though the play’s far-fetched premise could, in less capable hands, be used as a mere vehicle for zany comic misunderstandings, Neill employs it to great dramatic effect. For the sake of their mother’s well-being, the characters are forced to take her delusions seriously; in the process of trying to bring Diana back to ‘normal’ they’re forced to grapple with matters of divorce and sexual discovery as well as cases of familial favoritism. For instance, Martha, who is Diana and Jeff’s adopted daughter, is seen by Diana as Elliot, Perry’s incompetent lieutenant, while Olive becomes Perry’s loyal and trusted right-hand man, Saunders. The disparity in this “casting” eats away at Martha, reinforcing her sense that she’s never quite fit in with the rest of the family. Conflicts like these are proof of the cleverness of the play’s central gambit; Neill uses the fantastic as a lens through which to examine real domestic traumas.

Lizzie’s role as Perry’s darling Elizabeth likewise seems to be no mistake. Though she initially plays along with Diana’s passions in order to be a supportive caretaker, Lizzie soon finds herself swept up in them. Alexander’s commanding, formal presence as Diana (as Perry) mixes with Spivey’s sweetness and uncertainty, and the resulting courtship is both charming and slightly awkward to watch unfold, in a way that feels wholly intentional. Their escalating closeness, in both the Perry-world and the real one, serves as the warm, hopeful heart of the play. Still, important questions are raised by the relationship that remain unanswered. The age difference between the two (Lizzie is the same age as Diana’s two daughters) felt a tad skeevy, generating an unease that was only compounded by the breach in medical ethics that this caretaker-patient relationship represents.

Fortunately, these overlooked details feel less like elemental problems in the script than missed opportunities for conflict that could be explored in future revisions. Jeff’s role in the proceedings also felt somewhat underdeveloped, especially when, all of a sudden, his character slipped towards stereotypical sitcom-dad territory and whined about the way Diana “nagged” him. And though we do get a sense of Olive’s homebody nature and Martha’s business-oriented go-getter personality, it would have been more effective had the dramatist had gone deeper into what made the two daughters so radically different. These shortcomings leave this iteration of the play feeling slightly underdone, but they’re hardly damning. The majority of the dramatic elements set up by Neill work quite well, and the few that don’t could be easily tinkered with, expanded, and refined. A sturdy theatrical framework is already in place; it might just need a little redecorating.

Joshua Glenn-Kayden’s direction of the show is fine if a bit standard. He gets reasonably strong performances from all of the actors, Alex Alexander and Tonasia Jones especially, though from time to time it feels as if potential dramatic opportunities are being ignored. In one scene, for example, when Diana-as-Perry was being confronted by her daughters, Lizzie just stood in the background, content to observe rather than react. Moments of actorly indifference were the exception rather than the rule, but Don’t Give Up the Ship demands all hands on deck at all times.

The technical elements of Don’t Give Up the Ship are understated but well-executed. As alluded to above, Andrew Duncan Will’s sound work is excellent, and Harrison Pease Burke clearly had fun designing the shifts in lighting that signify the play’s journey from the real world to the Perry-world inside Diana’s head. Madelynne Hayes’s scenic design cleverly incorporates colors of the sea and cloth backdrops that resemble canvas sails, and the props provided by Kelly Smith and Julia Fioravanti add subtle touches of both the domestic and the nautical. The set’s furniture is somewhat jumbled and inconsistent in design, which initially seemed strange, but this hodge-podge of styles turns out to perfectly match the chaotic home life Diana and her family have built for themselves.

So, was Fresh Ink Theatre’s admirable mission to foster the development of new work successful this time out? It certainly was. Though neither the play nor the production is flawless, Don’t Give Up the Ship is a script with rich potential, well worth Fresh Ink’s investment and the time of audience members seeking exciting, unconventional theater.

Erik Nikander is a critic, playwright, and filmmaker based in the New England area. His film criticism can be read on Medium and his video reviews on a variety of topics can be viewed on Youtube at EWN Reviews.