Defined by tragedy in ‘Salt Girl’

November 10, 2009|Don Aucoin, Globe Staff

John Kuntz gives an exceptionally brave performance in “The Salt Girl,’’ and not just because he performs one scene in the nude and another in a panda suit.

That may make “The Salt Girl’’ sound merely gimmicky. It’s much more than that. True, this one-man play, written by the actor, has gimmicks aplenty, including a “Hollywood Squares’’-style, floor-to-ceiling backdrop containing nearly two dozen TV sets, on which flicker images that range from humdrum to hallucinatory.

But it is the tormented human being in front of those monitors who commands most of our attention. His last name is Quint (he never tells us his first name), and within moments of his arrival onstage he is in the middle of a suicide attempt. Then the phone rings, first with an obscene call, and then with the news that his father has been in a serious car accident and is in a coma, near death.

In fits and starts, through flashbacks and reenactments, Quint recounts the tale of his sad and troubled family and the impact of a pivotal event. As with “Gone Baby Gone,’’ that event involved the disappearance of a child. In 1970, when his sister was 6 and their mother was pregnant with Quint, the girl vanished.

We never learn her name. She is simply “my sister,’’ an idealized abstraction. His father told him she looked like the umbrella-wielding girl on the Morton’s salt container, fueling the boy’s obsession with the sister he never knew. “I grew up believing that my sister was the salt girl,’’ Quint says. We see Quint as a teenager, tape-recording an “audio diary’’ of his daily life for her. He’ll spend decades wondering what she was like, whether she was still alive, and whether his own life might have turned out better if he had known her.

So, was Quint’s sister abducted? Or could she possibly have been murdered by Quint’s father, a man who specialized in devising intricate execution devices for the state? (“He liked music and art and concocting ways of killing people,’’ Quint says).

We are told that the girl’s disappearance drew nationwide attention; tabloid suspicion even fell on Quint’s mother, prompting a “Saturday Night Live’’ skit about pregnant women on killing sprees. His mother drowned a few years after his sister’s disappearance. An accident or a suicide? “Was my family, for lack of a better word, cursed?’’ muses Quint. Ultimately, the disappearance of his sister meant that Quint never really knew his mother or his father, either.