"Running in Place"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
Every summer 59E59 Theaters produces two bills of
one-acts, or “short plays” as they’re called here, under the rubric SUMMER
SHORTS. One-acts, considered an endangered species--and not to be confused with the increasingly prevalent 90-minute (more or less) one-acts now even invading Broadway--survive mainly because of programs such as this, in which several are bundled into
a single presentation. When people speak of them, of course, they’re generally
referring to plays of 30 minutes or less; really short short plays are increasingly popular, though; some festivals celebrate 10-minute plays while others actually focus on one-minute dramas. The challenges of compressing
narrative developments and character revelation into plays 30 minutes or less are
profound and, as in the plays discussed here, the results are usually problematic.
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| Clea Alsip, J.J. Kandel. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
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| J.J. Kandel, Clea Alsip. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
10K’s two characters are those ubiquitous constructs
we know as the Woman (Clea Alsip) and the Man (J.J. Kandel). The Man and the
Woman are joggers, and the “k” in the title refers to kilometers, which the
Woman counts instead of miles. Strangers at a suburban park, they meet just as
they’re beginning an early morning jog, and agree to run together. As they go,
they chat casually, expressing themselves more or less obliquely in Mr. LaBute’s
naturalistic dialogue, beneath which flows a stream of hint-dropping subtext.
Neither is especially well informed, as they refer ignorantly to how Asian
countries control population growth; mention their respective families while
implying they’re unhappily married; discuss the wisdom of her having left her
two-year-old girl at home alone; and drift into talk of fantasies vis a vis the
messiness of reality. Naturally, their small talk inches toward sex and, for
all their politesse, there’s a definite aroma of endorphins as the Woman slyly lights the man's emotional Bunsen burner. Nothing untoward happens, but it’s clear that the
fantasy of a future encounter has created a chemical reaction.
The press release for 10K suggests that there’s more here
than I’ve described, that perhaps these people aren’t meeting for the first
time; could this be something the characters do regularly? Still, there’s
little reason not to accept the piece at face value as the chance encounter of
two unhappily married strangers who enjoy the momentary pleasure of a sexual
fantasy that can sustain them when they’ve been jogged back to their personal realities.
What makes the play most memorable, however, is that, for perhaps 80% of the
time, the two fine actors jog in place, running in a steady rhythm toward the
audience, much as Shelden Best did a couple of season’s back in THE LONELINESS
OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER. It’s a stunt performance, but both Ms. Alsip and
Mr. Kandel carry it off by combining athletic sturdiness with honest and, under
the circumstances, surprisingly subtle acting. Nice work.
Up next is Vickie Ramirez’s less substantial GLENBURN
12 WP, directed by Kel Haney and named for a very expensive whiskey that
figures in the action. Ms. Ramirez, a Native American playwright, locates us in
a small Irish pub on Vanderbilt Avenue opposite Grand Central Station. A young
black man, Troy (W. Tre Davis), in backward-facing baseball cap, hoody, and winter
jacket, enters to take a break from an apparently race-related protest
demonstration at the station (the press release say it’s a “die-in” but the
play doesn’t specify this). The joint is empty of both a bartender and customers
until Roberta (Tanis Parenteau), an attractive, well-dressed woman in high
heels arrives a moment later. She, it turns out, is a Native American attorney. In both
cases, appearances can be deceiving.
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| Tanis Parenteau, W. Trey Davis. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Troy, sensitive to others’ perceptions of him, is very
careful about not doing anything that might be mistaken for an illegal act,
while Roberta acts more freely, taking drinks for herself and Troy, although leaving
money to pay for them so as to assuage Troy’s fears. Much of their conversation covers
racial issues, black and NDN (Indian), but the plot’s engine is driven by a crime,
no more about which shall be said here. However, what seems an ordinary, if
spiky, conversation between strangers drifts increasingly into improbability,
especially once Troy and Roberta begin testing one another with arcane quotes
from famous persons, and Troy reveals the unexpected news of what he does for a living. The point of this nicely performed exercise is summed up by Roberta’s parting quote from Native
American Sherman Alexie, “Don’t live up to your stereotypes.”
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| Tanis Parenteau, W. Trey Davis. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Thinnest of the trio is Matthew Lopez’s sentimental
THE SENTINELS, a 9/11-inspired piece about three widows who try to meet
annually at a coffee shop near the site of the World Trade Center, where their
husbands, all of whom worked for the same company, died that fateful day. Mr.
Lopez uses the backward-moving chronology of plays like BETRAYAL, beginning in
2011, with each succeeding scene taking place the year before, thus giving an
idea of how the women moved on with their lives after the tragedy. The clock
moves backward to 2002, then skips to 2000, when the women are gathered at
Windows on the World to celebrate the hiring of one of their husbands.
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| Meg Gibson, Michelle Beck. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Director Stephen Brackett has chosen to have
projections for each scene indicating which year is involved, but, unlike the script,
has detached the words “September 11,” a date that soon becomes
evident anyway. Some years go by without anyone showing up (other than the same
waitress [Zuzanna Szadkowski]), others are missing at least one person, and
others are represented only by one character, Alice (Meg Gibson), wife of the
company’s owner, is the oldest of the group; she's determined to continue the
tradition of memorializing their late spouses, while Christa (Kellie Overbey) grows increasingly cynical about the whole thing. And since Kelly
(Michelle Beck) has remarried, moved to Oregon, and is expecting, the annual
meetings appear to have run their course.
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| Meg Gibson, Zuzanna Szadkowski. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
While there’s a certain curiosity in such reverse chronology
plays as they strip away the layers of time to show how things got to where
they are, there are few surprises here, the characters are more shadow than
substance, and the play seems to rely mainly on the resonance of 9/11 for its
emotional effects. The performances are all suitable, but the play itself never rises much above Ground Zero.
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| Meg Gibson, Kellie Overbey. Photo: Carol Rosegg. |
Like Mr. LaBute's 10K, the one-acts on this program are basically running in place.
59E59 Theaters
59 East Fifty-Ninth Street, NYC
Through August 29