4000 Miles is a play of surface and depths, with a canny eye for external behavior that reveals its characters’ hunger for meaningful connection. Its plot is straightforward: 21-year-old Leo, who’s been out of contact with his family since the middle of a cross-country bike trip, arrives late one night at the door of his octogenarian grandmother Vera. Leo’s been on the move—across the country, away from his family—looking for a haven in Vera’s West Village apartment. She is a fierce and fiercely independent woman, glad for company as she negotiates the changes age has brought to her own life.
The pair haven’t spent much time together, and playwright Amy Herzog’s dialogue captures the rhythms of their uneasy if affectionate companionship. The joys and strains of this shared household play out so convincingly, so seemingly casually, that the play’s action comes into focus slowly. Herzog uses her characters’ squabbles and shared connections to unearth the ways that change and grief work through these two characters in ways neither Leo or Vera quite realize.
Amy Herzog came to theatre as an actor, which may account for her uncommon sensitivity to the subtleties of behavior and intention, the ways characters can do one thing while suggesting another, consciously or not. While the themes of her plays range from the legacy of the American Left to marital betrayal to recovered memory, her plots turn on small moments of recognition, understated epiphanies of understanding or distance.
Herzog’s writing maps out ironies and contradictions present in most people’s lives, complexities that many writers strip from their characters in the name of narrative efficiency. But Herzog is exploring the many ways life, and change, are rarely efficient—or even entirely knowable. Through the ebb and flow of her characters’ sudden declarations or lingering silences, she creates a compassionate, unsentimental play that reveals two people finding new perspectives on frailty and responsibility, and on how to live gracefully in the world..
—Adrien-Alice Hansel