Waxing wroth . . .
Equity Showcase (closed)
by Louis Lopardi . . . December 11, 2001
This evening of three one-act plays was saved only be the presence of some amazingly natural acting on the stage. Featured plays were: The Miracle (Who are they talking to? Why the cliche heartbeats between every scene? Ultimately, do we care about these people at all?); Sunday Brunch Thingy (moderately bearable); and Fab & Ren (moderately unbearable). Alan Kanevsky made good use of the minimalist lighting of the Jan Hus Playhouse. Well crafted but misguided sound was by Marcus Rodreguez and Oh! Studio.
Director Anthony Ciccotelli gave the actors plenty of temporal and physical space to develop, but the paucity of written ideas created a vacuum which defied development. After plays there was little or no applause from an anaesthetized audience. John Stuart Freeman appeared in two plays, bringing a relaxed, natural brand of acting. Benjamin Bauman also brought a self-assured acting talent to bear in two plays. Gioa De Cari as Leigh in Sunday Brunch Thingy had a commanding stage presence - not easy to do with ingenue roles. And one wanted to see more of Susan Barnes Walker, who as Elaine in The Miracle said volumes with the merest of vocal inflections or facial gestures. Other cast members - Sue Dora Galloway, Kyle Senor, and Ledger Free - were all natural actors, perfectly at home on even a hastily arranged stage. But the characters they had to play were simply not entirely there.
If characters are non-entities, then monologues, however crafted, are merely words. The mis-en-scene as a structuring device simply does not work, because we don't care about the people put into those scenes. The result was an overlong evening of stilted, unnatural dialogue - of sentence fragments mostly; Like spending two hours in a ward for the borderline catatonic and autistic. And the audience yawned interminably, simply because there was a paucity of ideas. Images did flow - thanks largely to a director desperately trying to arrange meaning ex post facto - but they were images from some kind of dyslexic anti-sitcom: a "Twin Peaks" with neither plot nor drama - only macabre bits of subplot.
While the macabre is always parcel of Wrath's writing, one can only hope he will abandon this branch of so-called discovery, and return to the writing we know he can produce; for now he is questioning mere syllables and nouns instead of ideas. Not a verb in sight.
A knowledgeable and bored audience (no, not even angry, just bored) bravely refused to really applaud until cast members appeared for their well-deserved curtain call.
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