As the family pet, it is worth noting that Carl doesn’t speak much – something that will become relevant later on in the second half of the play (thirty-five years later) when four adults appear in the same attic with the same names, apparently to escape the repast downstairs following a funeral service at church. In these family make-believe role-plays, older brother Chris (an intense and mysterious Ryan Foust) and older sister Kate (a determined and astute Maren Heary) play husband and wife and Dad and Mom to their younger siblings Addie (an introspective and imaginative Casey Hilton) and Carl (a lonely and somewhat ignored Harrison Fox) who is most often assigned the role of family dog.
This revelation begins when the children realize they have been abandoned in the attic of their family home and when one of them, Chris, decides to act.
Bess Wohl scrapes away at the underbelly of the dysfunction, carefully revealing the provenance of the Conlee family’s fractured and pernicious family system. “Make Believe” is not just another play about a dysfunctional family. The children’s playlist alternates between typical children’s games and the more serious role-playing of the Conlee family that reveals the intricacies of the family’s dysfunction. “Make Believe” begins in the 1980s in the attic (a stunning and expansive design by David Zinn) of the Conlee family home, the playroom of the four Conlee children aged 5 to 12 years old. The playwright raises several enduring questions, including whether there is a difference between make-believe and real life or if they are perhaps the same phenomenon, and whether one can ever escape the specter of dysfunction and childhood trauma. The nature-nurture psychological debate and the predestined-free will theological debate collide in Bess Wohl’s “Make Believe” currently running at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, resulting in the brave and somewhat disturbing exploration of the blurred boundaries between what is perceived to be real life and what is perceived to be make-believe.