‘The Tall Boy’ powerfully and sadly reminds us of mankind’s unrelenting global inhumanity

When the lights come up on “The Tall Boy,” an impassive woman is shuffling papers, trying to get a grip on the impossible job she’s been tasked with. Nothing could have prepared her for this, she says. Not even her nightmares.

Adapted by Simon Bent from Kay Boyle’s short story “The Lost,” the 70-minute, one-person drama follows “Missus” as she attempts to repatriate displaced and unaccompanied children in the wake of World War II. She’s an American serving in Germany, working in a repurposed mansion in the shadow of what was a death camp. The displaced arrive in trucks and on foot — skeletal bodies, hair alive with vermin, feet so raw and damaged they can’t put on the boots they’re issued.

The duty of Missus (Tandy Cronyn, daughter of American theater royalty Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn) is to find out where they’re from and who their families are. Or were. If they have surviving relatives, they’ll be sent to their care. If not? Well, that’s not so clear. Maybe they’ll be sent to the U.S. Maybe they’ll be adopted there. Maybe not.

Missus (as she’s called by the refugees) faces a wrenching task. The children, many of them very young, don’t remember where they’re from or who their families were. Some have forgotten their native language. Some do have memories but would probably be better off without them.

It’s difficult to watch director David Hammond‘s production without being reminded of the seemingly endless cycle of cruelties the world visits on its most vulnerable residents. As specific as it is, “The Tall Boy” feels like an earlier chapter in a story that keeps playing out decade after decade. From the orphanage of “The Tall Boy” to the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh to the refugee detention centers of El Paso, children are swept up, generation after generation, in tragedies not of their making.

Cronyn plays Missus as well as her cigar-smoking military superiors and the three boys near the heart of the story. That trio starts out optimistic — almost cocky with the surety they’ll be adopted by the American GIs who promised them as much. One speaks with a Brooklyn accent. The tall boy of the title has a molasses-thick southern drawl. The third talks like Jimmy Cagney if Cagney were a squeaky, scrawny prepubescent kid.

They explain that they’ve spent two years as “mascots” for American forces, following them through battles, tagging along to the liberation of the camps. The boys assume it’s just a matter of paperwork before they‘ll be “stateside” with their army pals — the three soldiers who taught them to speak English and promised them new lives.

It falls to the overworked and overwhelmed Missus to tell these youngsters that a ticket out probably isn’t in the cards. Her job is to care for them — which, in the upside-down world of war, means crushing their dreams and forcing them to understand the grim reality of a world in which surviving unimaginable pain means you have to endure more.

Cronyn slips from character to character without fanfare. Clad in khaki drab, she morphs with little more than a shift in tone and posture.

Each of the boys is in for his own unique experience with bitter disappointment. One hides out in a hayloft, drowning his sorrow in a bottle of black-market booze. One offers proof that he simply must go to the United States. His parents are dead. He saw them both hanged.

The tall boy’s predicament is particularly excruciating. Try as she might, Missus is unable to explain American segregation and why a soldier who is “black as night” can’t adopt a white child like the tall boy — at least not in the U.S. In Cronyn’s performance, you can practically see the wheels turning in the tall boy’s head as he tries to figure out why something as arbitrary, unfair and useless as race-based separation would be the law of the land. The stars above shine the same on everyone, he also points out.

With its one-person cast and black box theater-friendly set (a table, a chair and an army cot) “The Tall Boy” is a compact, easily produced exploration of global inhumanity.

At 70 minutes, it’s on the brief side. It’s a story that deserves more time. If Cronyn’s performance is any indication, she’s up to the task of providing just that.

Catey Sullivan is a freelance writer.

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