Bathing in Moonlight at the McCarter: spoilers ahead

 I enjoyed Anna in the Tropics and was hoping that Bathing in Moonlight would be a similarly well crafted and enjoyable play. I was pleased with the acting, but disappointed in the workmanship of the play itself.

As this is McCarter in an election year, I fully expected the  "no walls" diatribe masquerading as a sermon by a dedicated priest, the central character in the play. What would an Emily Mann production be without a call to socialist arms?

The play centers on the life of a priest in present day Miami. It is important to emphasize that this is a contemporary play, as the finale would be more appropriately set a century earlier. The grand  outrage of an entire city at the character who has an affair with a woman his own age, is certainly not representative of 2015. When I was in a Catholic school in 1970, a priest did exactly that (left the priesthood and married his girlfriend) with not a word from the media. The ending was embarrassingly anachronistic.

That aside, the play does little to develop the other characters. Our female lead is particularly vague and poorly focused. Marcella is a thirty something, unemployed single mother. We never learn why she never married the father of Trini, why she loses her job, or why she chooses to be alone until she is propositioned by a handsome priest...one who has been paying her mortgage. We do know that she is presented as a rather devout woman who did not get involved with the Reverend Father until it was crystal clear that her brother was going to be no use in paying the bills. While there was an attraction, her motivation is unclear.

The brother, who also plays the grandmother's memory of her late husband, is also murky. He fails out of medical school, disappears, then blames his mother for his actions and his subsequent depression. We never learn what his "real" life goals were, if he even had any, or if he plans on moving beyond self pity.

As for grandma, whose family lost all when Castro came to power, was she a conniving, driving bitch who wanted to keep up appearances, or was she a mother who wanted her family to succeed in the US? At no point did she present as a woman who "forced" her late husband to work three jobs, or who could make her son go to medical school. Her demise, well and quite movingly telegraphed by the playwright, went virtually unnoticed by her onstage family. Fine if the family was callous and relieved, sloppy if they were not.

Back to the priest. While he came across on some level as a tortured man in love, let's not forget that he kept her as "my secret" as he showed no intention of marrying his mistress until discovered by persons unknown and confronted by the Bishop. Secondly, he paid the mortgage, long a literary lure for an affair, and mentioned his "inheritance" which was also unclear to the audience.

The acting was superb, they made the most of a play in needs of plenty of work. I hope it gets some revisions. In a world where affairs and subterfuge are no longer shocking (and would certainly garner no attention from the local television news unless the participants were celebrities), the author needs to flesh out the motivations of his characters. As the play was under two hours without an intermission, Milo Cruz has the stage time, and certainly the talent, to do this. Also, he needs to lose the faux reporters and the suggestion that the community will destroy the lovers, it hasn't done that in a very long time