1:00pm – 2:00pm – The Reviews

The Doppler of My Heart by Rick Park, Directed by Josh Glenn-Kayden, Presented by Company One

Seven plays in and we have, by my reckoning, the first truly great ten minute play. It stars Greg Maraio and Becca Lewis (making a welcome return from the one minute readings of the previous day) as a married couple, Donnie and Eileen, who are taking a drive up to Connecticut. Their accents are thick and Boston. There’s amusing talk of checking “dopplah” “weathah”, as if she’d known it’d be this cold she’d have worn her “parkah” (… guess I probably don’t need the extra “h” on that word). There’s this delightful “Who’s on First”-type exchange as Eileen is complains about missing her friend’s nephew in a school production of Wicked. (he's playing Glinda and wants to perform on Broadway. "Yeah," quips Donnie, "Broadway in Somerville")

“It’s Wicked?” he asks.

“Yeah!”

“Wicked what?”

It’s hard to describe what made the play so effective. A huge acknowledgement must go to both Greg Maraio and Becca Lewis who absolutely nail these characters. In different hands, these two could have drifted towards caricature, but both actors imbue the characters with a lived-in rapport that heightened the comedy and then ultimately sold the extremely grounded tenderness between the two. It’s hard to imagine this play being better cast, and I can only imagine how thrilling it was for the playwright to witness his words come to life by a pair of such professionals.

Not that the play itself was in need of assistance: The dialogue drifts from amusing anecdote to conversation piece with an ease capable only through sharp observation and careful craftsmanship. The play ends with Donnie stopping the car in a parking lot to the bafflement of Eileen. Until he explains that this lot used to be a field, the same field he witnessed her pitching a no-hitter at a softball, the very moment, he explains, he fell in love with her. “Do you remember?” he asks. “Are you kidding? You think I’m going to forget pitching a no-hitter!” (I’m paraphrasing)

The sincere simplicity with which he proffers his love to her, and her charming return of that love was just beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. This play was a character study that culminated in a renewal of love. It had no other agenda or complications. And yet somehow, in embracing the quiet tenderness of an ordinary working class couple, this play managed to produce one of the most moving and touching moments of the entire marathon. Really, hats off to everyone involved in this piece. I was highly impressed.

The Sin Eater by Charles Draghi

A very interesting play. Two old friends sit in a room. The older one (a fantastic Richard McElvain) begins to ramble about an old acquaintance (Carrigan or Corrigan, the name is in dispute) who was a Sin Eater. His younger friend (the pleasantly understated Robert Pemberton) half-listens to his friend ramble on about the practice of sin eating (a truly fascinating subject, a topic that this play barely concerns itself with despite the title (not that I’m objecting)).

It’s that “half-listening” aspect that becomes the crux of the conflict between the two. After Pemberton (the characters are without titles, so I’m going with the actor’s names) admits to only listening to one in three words the other utters, McElvain responds with apoplectic affront. Indeed it takes almost the entire play to calm him down as the two begin to dissect the nature of their relationship and the urgency of being heard.

“I am my stories.” McElvain explains. They are all he has left and as he seems to no longer have the agency to live his life in his twilight years, he relies on his reminiscences to provide meaning for his otherwise barren existence. Pemberton is earnest but honest in his response to his old friend. It’s not that he’s always half listening, but that he selectively listens. He likens his relationship to McElvain as a carousel. He pays attention when a particularly vibrant horse comes around, his stories so to speak, but he can’t be expected to give McElvain the kind of undivided attention the man so desperately seeks.

McElvain dawdles by the chair, by the doorway. Everything about his body language says, “I am ready to storm out of here, but please please stop me.” The man’s face (and this time I AM speaking of the actor) is a roiling canvas of conflicted emotions and I could hardly take my eyes off him.

The two eventually reach an understanding. Pemberton points out that he made the choice to be there for his friend, to listen (or at least pretend to listen) to his stories, a choice he continues to make up to the present. The play seems to suggest that the best we can hope to get from each other is not so much interaction, but fealty and mere presence. For a play in which so little actually happens, it provided me (and continues to provide me) with an awful lot of food for thought.

The Press Asses the Gettysburg Address by Robert Brustein, Directed by Caitlin Langstaff, Presented by Suffolk University Theatre

I should be inclined to like this play. It had some good jokes. The performances were full and committed. It has nice satirical high concept: “What would happen if Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were parsed by today’s news media?” So… why the heck did this fall flat for me?

There are a few reasons, but the most major one was that it felt very… obvious. The cast consists of Wolf Spritzer, Sean Inanity, and Greta Van Insufferable. By my mark, only Sean Inanity works purely from a pun constructor’s perspective (though it’s a pretty good one). The play overtly lambasts CNN (Spritzer reminds us constantly that this is only a break in their continuing coverage of the missing Malaysian flight, a gag whose repetition succeeds in killing its humor) and generally the blather of politico talking heads that infest cable news in all of its forms.

It just seems to me that is picking on a pretty easy target. It’s not like were lacking for contemporary satirists to take the piss out of these bloviating blowhards. By my count we now have three expertly written television programs who take a knife to these networks on a weekly basis: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and the very welcome Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Perhaps I’m a bit spoiled as both a political junkie and an avid viewer of all three of these programs, but to my mind making the repeated point that pundits will twist anything to justify their own interests seemed about as fresh an observation as noticing the earth revolves around the sun. It’s old news.

Not that the actors should be faulted. Allyn Burrows, Jeremiah Kissel, and Bobbie Steinbach (Spritzer, Inanity, and Insufferable respectively (the names not their attributes)) performed with aplomb and gave the material their all. Burrows was particularly delightful as an almost muppetized version of the classic news anchor. His superciliousness reminded me of Sam the Eagle. Both Kissel and Steinbach (of whom I shall have much more to say in my very very last review) on the other hand, really channeled the haughty contemptuousness of so many commentators.

But, none of it seemed very novel or interesting. Moreover, it seems that the playwright overlooked the fact that the speech was subject to partisan nitpicking when it was first delivered. SNL recently did a great Weekend Update section (and I haven’t uttered those words in a while) in which a reviewer who panned the speech at the time doubles down on his rhetoric, the point being that the chattering class is hardly a new phenomenon.

There were a couple of jokes near the end that morbidly referenced Ford’s Theater (Our American Cousin is “explosive” and he hopes Lincoln will “give it a shot”). The lines elicited groans, but at least they felt genuinely dangerous, a quality lacking from this play and a quality that should be present in all good satire. 

[Dis]Connected by Karla Sorenson, Directed by Victoria Townsend, Presented by Commonwealth Shakespeare Company

Without a doubt the play [Dis]Connected was the most frightening of the entire marathon. I don’t mean that it was frighteningly bad. I mean that by the end I was practically covering my eyes with a terrible sense of mounting dread, a sense expertly elicited by both a sharply paced script and a compelling performance by Michelle Martinelli.

A teenage girl lounges on a couch, distracted by her phone. She speaks to us with a casual but confessional air. The average teen texts between 50 to 60 times a day. Did we know that? Of course there has to be outliers. Some teens might not text at all, which means that other teens have to pick up the slack on the other end of the bell curve. She’s been taking statistics. She's on the high end.

As she speaks, we get a nuanced picture of a girl who’s accustomed to isolation. She’s alone in the house, a situation that has apparently been common since she was much smaller. As she speaks, she keeps receiving and occasionally sending texts to a boy we see far upstage in the darkness, his back to us. At first she seems coyly charmed by the texts, especially as she tells the story of how they met. How she “stole” him from his then-girlfriend at a school function and how they’d danced all night and made out in the woods afterwards. Her friends are jealous that she managed to bag someone so handsome, someone so popular.

But those friends aren’t around anymore. He didn’t “like” them, and with a creeping unquiet we begin to witness the development of what has clearly become a controlling and emotionally abusive relationship, if not yet physically abusive. The boy lashes out at her for embarrassing him when they go out together, he hates it if she even so much as speaks to another male, and insists on texting her constantly to monitor what she’s doing.

For people who have not been in an abusive relationship, it can sometimes be difficult to understand the psychology of the abused. How could you stay in that kind of relationship? In the parlance of Dan Savage, why not DTMFA? One of the ways that makes this play so special is how it humanizes the process. We see the initial allure. We recognize that the girl began already isolated, an isolation that only continues as the boyfriend exerts more and more control over every aspect of her life. While he hasn't yet resorted to physical violence, he does abuse himself: both cutting and literally putting out cigarettes in his arm to see how long he can withstand the pain. She interprets these acts as his willingness to damage himself, but the audience recognizes a deeper savagery and darker potential for violence.

She tries to break up with him; arranges for a meeting in an public McDonalds. He doesn’t come. She waits hours. When she finally gets back home he immediately texts her and we recognize that he’s been stalking her as well. When she finally musters up the courage to turn off her phone, the boy in the background flips his stool and storms out. She seems relived. She finally did it. She cut the chord, but there’s no respite for the audience. We know what’s coming. The play ends with a sharp knock and a girl alone on a couch.

Before I close, it should be noted what a stellar job Michelle Martinelli does. Very natural and winsome. We immediately love her and it’s the affection she so affably wins that makes us so invested in her fate. A very compelling piece of theater.

Love, Dad by Richard Dresser, Directed by Josh Flenn-Kayden, Presented by American Repertory Theater

It’s a bit crazy. There is so little substance to this play. The plot is thus: Father of the Bride gives a miraculously tactless toast at his daughter’s wedding, offending pretty much everyone at the party. That’s it. There’s a bare minimum of character development. There’s no arc. The character goes through no journey. Nothing really happens at all.

So why is this one of my absolute favorite plays of the marathon?

Simple answer. It was funny. And I’m talking funny. Stephen Barkhimer killed as the dad. In a marathon replete with murder, this was the first casualty of the afternoon: Barkhimer slayed the audience.

In competition with some pretty stiff competitors, I don’t think there was any play that matched the sheer laughs per minute ratio as this comedic tour de force. It was a ballsy choice: in essence the play is simply a ten minute character-based stand up routine. But as someone who has had some experience with stand up (and comedies) audiences can be fickle. This could have so easily landed with a thud. The jokes, delivered a second too early or late might have missed their mark.

Luckily Barkhimer delivered with effortless joviality. It’s a damned privilege to see what happens when a truly talented performer is handed such strong material.

I wish I could just write out my favorite lines, but then I’d wind up typing up the entire play. Plus, as I mentioned in my previous post, they haven’t made the current crop of plays available for purchase yet, and I can barely make out my useless scrawl. I was too busy clutching my sides and barking laughter to write too much down. But if you can: hunt down Mr. Barkhimer and make him perform it for you. You won’t be disappointed. The lines themselves were balls to the wall hilarious, but some of the best bits were his silent reactions to the assembled guests as he realized he’d overstepped his bounds. Christ, what a fun fun play.