Eran Kolirin’s “The Band’s Visit,” onstage through December 17 at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, which is co-producing the play with SpeakEasy Stage, is a very polished, very melodious presentation of what can happen when two marginalized communities, respectively, Israeli and Arabic, realize that they may have more in common with each other than with the rather frigid embrace of their two ethnicities.
It’s not an instant embrace, and not one without thorns, but the point is made believable, in many small and greater instances that one’s ‘family’ is an elastic concept.
I’m on Page 22 of this musical’s program where the two principal actors, Brian Thomas Abraham and Jennifer Apple, stare at each other with visible tension from opposite ends of a wooden bench.
Mr. Abraham is in the smart blue military uniform of his Egyptian band, while Ms. Apple, a mature, experienced ‘swinging single,’ wears the cuffs of her denim pants fashionably rolled, deftly paired with a maroon sweater that matches her semi-hot lipstick.
Their postures suggest they might at any moment either lean themselves into an inseparable embrace or jump to their feet to run in opposite directions.
But where would they go if they separated? And how would they ever make out with such diverse, oppositional baggage if they chanced fate by conjoining, for a fling, or a life?
Mr. Abraham commands an Egyptian military band, very smart in their uniforms and well acquainted with their instruments. But instead of a cosmopolitan city, their directions seem to have landed them in a provincial backwater that boasts no Arabic Cultural Center — as well as no center and culture. To boot, the Egyptian embassy never returns their calls on the one pay phone in town.
They are stranded, indeed, but stranded in a town of stranded inhabitants, they sniff a strange commonality.
On their first daytime date, not really a date, but a kind of parallel wandering in a world too busy to acknowledge their individualities, Jennifer Apple’s character shows Mr. Abraham’s band conductor the town park, apologizing as she gestures: “It doesn’t look like a park…”
We, the audience don’t see the park that doesn’t look like a park, but we imagine it to the tune of Ms. Apple’s mournful apology. Just as her singing voice eloquently limns the expanses and voids of the ‘park’ of her inner life.
Whenever the Egyptian band strikes up a tune, it is also bitter-sweet. But, instead of melodrama, to this critic’s ear, the two tastes are balanced in music and plot.
There is real agony as well, in the jubilation, hostility and the compassion that beats beneath well-paced major and minor actions of these two tribes as they mix and mingle in a coming together that almost never happened. And yet, now that it has so improbably, comically, and tragically happened, they can’t seem to let it go.
And we can’t either.
(“The Band’s Visit” continues through December 17 at The Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, visit huntingtontheatre.org.)