4000 MILES
4000 Miles, Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, 7 February - 23 March 2025. Photography by Daniel Boud
On opening night of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, newly-appointed artistic director Mitchell Butel was clearly moved as he paid homage to the night’s star Nancye Hayes on her return to the company after two decades. Her presence alone made the evening remarkable: one of the great song and dance maestras in a role with neither tune nor jazz hand in sight. Instead, Hayes plays a creaky, shuffling, crotchety 91-year-old grandma – Vera.
The play opens as Vera’s downtown, rent-controlled New York City apartment is invaded in the early hours by 21-year-old grandson Leo and his muscular fat-tired bike. Leo (Shiv Palekar) has just cycled across the USA – to find himself and get away from problems back home – and on discovering that girlfriend Bec is not enchanted by his unannounced arrival, he’s fetched up at Nana’s.
4000 Miles was written in 2011 and successfully performed at the Lincoln Center before transferring and touring. Sydney independents MopHead and Catnip Productions boldly secured the rights and mounted a scintillating production, directed by Anthony Skuse, in 2013. Sydney companies of all sizes have long favoured American and British hits, especially those with Olivier, Tony, or Pulitzer attached. So, it’s a safe choice for a state/national theatre company in wobbly transition (from Kip Williams to Butel). And if the intention was to find a vehicle for the legendary Hayes, it’s a winner, because she is.
The 3am incursion by her sweaty, smelly grandson sparks Vera’s zingy one-liners and tart observations. Her sharp mind is in contrast to alarming frailty as she totters around the apartment, hanging on to walls and handy furniture. Leo, however, seems more entitled and scruffy than emotionally and physically wrecked. And he’s way too attractive to be dumped, even if he has a closer relationship with his bike than with Bec.
Nevertheless, in a play, directed by Kenneth Moraleda, that depends on nuance and delineated scenes and character interplays, those elements are often absent – except Vera who is unstoppably right throughout. The same can be said for the late-in-the-piece, cameo appearance of Shirong Wu as casual pick-up Amanda (“not Amelia!”). Her towering platform boots are not subtle, but everything else she does is, in a portrait of hilarious, free-spirited inebriation.
Long before Leo’s attempted one-night stand, however, the reasons for his arrival at Vera’s are teased out in explorations of his life and sadness. These are cannily reverse-mirrored by her own: although she’s a widow, outliving her friends and neighbours, Vera is buoyed by the pithy wisdom of a long life. She is therefore unburdened by having to give a shit about political correctness, or the finer feelings of youthful snowflakes.
It’s impossible not to laugh at her frequent dark acid drops, yet it makes it more obvious when Herzog’s sardonic humour is mis-delivered. Leo is mourning the death of his best friend and riding companion. He tells Vera how a speeding poultry truck overturned on the highway and smothered his friend beneath hundreds of chooks, in a muddy puddle. Approximately four people laughed. Oh well.
Vera, whose bookshelves reflect her lifelong leftist politics is sympathetic but not sentimental, much as is Bec (Ariadne Sgouros) when she turns up to clear the air with Leo. Sgouros has the least satisfactory role as the grounded and normal one and makes more of it than it probably deserves.
Aside from the redoubtable Hayes, the other stars of the show are Jeremy Allen’s detailed and convincing apartment setting, including a Fern Green dial-up phone on a once-stylish telephone table-seat; Kelsey Lee’s equally thoughtful lighting design, where a street tree is never in darkness, and incidental music from composer-sound designer Jessica Dunn that sets time, place and mood with delicious rightness.
All in all, the company, led by a splendid Nancye Hayes who is the cranky comic heart, delivers an hour and 40 minutes of excellent entertainment that will neither frighten the horses nor bring out the keffiyehs.
