By Bill Marx

The script is representative of the pitfalls of current theatrical minimalism — less can so easily be less.

4000 Miles by Amy Herzog. Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. Staged by the Berkshire Theatre Group at the Unicorn Theatre, 6 East Street, Stockbridge, through June 2.

Evan Silverstein and Maria Tucci in the Berkshire Theatre Group production of 4000 Miles. Photo: Caelan Carlough

It is a strange and scary paradox. Movies are ballooning bigger and bigger (think Marvel superhero epics), new musicals are more spectacular than ever, and television miniseries are expanding into ambitious artistic territory. But straight dramas seem to be going in the opposite direction. They are shrinking, to the point where two plays could be comfortably staged in a teacup — at the same time. Increasingly, intermissions are disappearing, so what vaporous conflicts we get race by quickly, which in some cases might be a good thing. Productions may be around the length of a movie, but there are none of the visual compensations of cinema: no chance of any liberating jump cuts. That latter realization hit me especially hard as I sat through the Berkshire Theatre Group’s pedestrian production (at the Unicorn Theatre) of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. The innocuous script is representative of the pitfalls of theatrical minimalism — less can so easily be less. Annie Baker is the progenitor of this kind of genial voyage into the mundane, though she hangs out with her characters long enough to generate one or two spritzes of Chekhovian insight. (Notice: 4,000 Miles has been reviewed twice before in the Arts Fuse, a production at the Gloucester Stage Company and another at Shakespeare & Co. Both were extremely positive about the play. So this is a minority opinion.)

I am intrigued by Amy Herzog as a dramatist because, as an adapter, she has recently brought two plays (A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People) by my beloved Henrik Ibsen to Broadway, albeit with big stars to generate boffo box office. Alas, Ibsenite spirit is absent in this lo-cal domestic script, a benign amalgamation of coming-of-age melodrama and “odd couple” sitcom. A college age guy, Leo, returns from a bike ride across the country. He has been traumatized by what happened to male friend who was riding along with him on the trip. (At the last minute, Leo’s girlfriend, Bec, wisely decided not to take part in the endurance test.) Leo is reluctant to go back to his family in Minnesota because of a disconcerting incident at home, so he descends, unannounced, on his 91-year-old grandmother, Vera, in her Greenwich Village apartment.

The situation is set for an intergenerational confrontation for two kinda lost souls. He has a psychological Rubicon to cross to reach adulthood. She is dealing with the kind of age-related afflictions that — at least in plays like this — garner chuckles: easily lost hearing aids, moments of mental fog, and a proclivity to show up at embarrassing times, such when Leo is on the couch about to score with a one-night stand. Vera had been married to a leftist scholar, Joe, whom Leo seems to have admired; it is suggested that she has not gotten over her husband’s death. Of course, Vera and Leo don’t discuss politics — that might have brought in intrusive glimpses of reality.

No, the action is hermetically sealed, hogtied to bring about healing and bonding between young and very old. Part of the problem is that the characters’ wounds remain nebulous throughout — the reason behind Leo’s alienation from his family is a real head-scratcher. Nothing much is at stake because Leo and Vera’s relationship is never incisively probed or placed under undue pressure. Vera is around for easy laughs, to the point that her geriatric gags undercut scenes that might have generated some emotional power. When Leo finally opens up about what happened to his friend on his trip, it is a weirdly farcical anecdote, its jokiness amplified when Vera tells Leo at the end of his heartfelt confession that she had missed much of it because she had forgotten her hearing aid. She then gives Leo a showy hug of reassuring sympathy. Funny? Poignant? Hey, both are vulnerable at the same time! Let the mitigation of pain begin. 4,000 Miles drifts along to a predictably medicinal — but unconvincing — conclusion, at least in this go-round.

None of the performances of the cast move beyond the one note. Evan Silverstein leans hard into Leo’s tunnel-vision petulance, Maria Tucci wanders about, a caricature of a comic oldster firing off one-liners with frazzled timing. For mysterious reasons, Leo’s girlfriend Bec cares about the guy; Gabriela Torres doesn’t clarify the character’s yearning. As Amanda, Leo’s pick-up in the bar, Allison Ye infuses chatterbox energy into the staging, though the sexually candid woman comes off as a fast-talking escapee from a Netflix rom-com. Director Lizzie Gottlieb doesn’t vary the rhythms of the action, so the production plods along, stuck in the wrong gear.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.