stuff happens
Quickly, before I pass out from the NyQuil......
Tonight I saw this wretched play that my theatre professor directed. The play itself is pretty good, but the execution was painful. I'm pretty excited to rip it apart in my review. And the best part is... he will give me an A on it. Ha.
For anyone interested, my last review is posted on the course website as the example of how to do a review right. Or, if you want, take a look behind the cut :)
Gina Cole
10-03-07
Theatre 101
Professor Mark Kuntz
Pterodactyls
Swoop into Old Main, Snatch up Audience
As members of Wednesday’s opening-night audience file into Western Washington University’s Old Main Theatre, we are presented with a simple image: the silhouette of a pterodactyl on a classic, unassuming overhead projector. John Lennon’s voice permeates the air, rising with the bright lights that now shine on the screen. Then, with a single drum beat, the house is dark and hushed, and Todd Duncan begins his harried address.
Thus, too, begins the stranglehold that Student Theatre Productions’ cast of Pterodactyls has upon its audience.
The Nicky Silver play, first produced by New York’s Vineyard Theatre in 1993, spies on the Duncan family (plus a future in-law) and illustrates, at once darkly and hilariously, each member’s individual means of repression and denial as they trudge through an otherwise privileged existence. Although it was not Silver’s first work, it was the first to garner attention on the New York theatre scene, winning the Oppenheimer Prize for Best First Play.
Director Abe Manion, who most recently participated in 2007’s American College Theatre Festival as a workshop presenter, has done an exquisite job of allowing his actors to move freely within their roles and to explore every facet of their characters’ warped existence. (We as an audience are also aided in said exploration by a set that is composed entirely of shades of grey, production designer Casey Zander’s sublime manifestation of those shades of grey in which the Duncan family live their lives). As the characters address, alternately, the audience and each other, we never lose the illusion that the characters are fully in the moment with each other - while, of course, maintaining unique mental blocks on their present conditions. (Light and sound board operator Harry Jamieson deserves a nod as well in this department, for guiding the audience’s focus in such a distracted, almost manic work of storytelling.) Manion’s choice to open with Todd at the back of the theatre, making his way down the aisles between us as he makes his way through history in a monologue, immediately engages the audience and establishes a necessary rapport between those in the seats and those on the stage.
Justin Howe’s bewitching performance as the jaded and contemptuous Todd does not immediately move, but builds its traction with the audience as surely as Todd builds his titanic creation in the Duncan living room. Though at times weary, he speaks as though he relishes every word he’s saying. By the second act, Howe’s comedic capacity is out in full force, most markedly during a particularly haunting exchange with his future brother-in-law, Tommy. However, it is not merely in these more conspicuous scenes that Howe embraces and embodies his character’s complexities. He shines brightest in subtle moments - a snappy, cynical interjection, for example; or the way he interacts with his surroundings, slouching just so in a chair meant for upright upper-crust people such as his family, or holding a dinosaur bone as though it is almost phallic.
Not to be outdone, Delisle Merrill as Grace is the picture of dismissive social royalty, committing fully to each warble and drunken tremor. Her son Todd describes it best: Grace "registers oddly." Merrill seems to epitomize that description, expertly capturing the dialect of her character as she chirps and quavers about the stage like a well-coiffed, slightly inebriated bluejay.
When Silver’s yarn weaves to dour, yet somehow no less farcical, close, Jamieson once again employs lighting methods equally as simple-but-powerful as those with which he started: just as we were led to the screen on a single drum beat upon the play’s commencement, we are drawn at its conclusion with an ever-brightening spotlight to Todd’s "grotesque monument to the transience of everything," looming, illuminated, over the stage.
The only thing that may have shined brighter tonight than this final beam is Pterodactyls’ ever-brilliant cast.
Pterodactyls runs Wednesday, October 3rd to Sunday, October 7th at 7:30 PM in Western Washington University’s Old Main Theatre. Abe Manion directs. Tickets are $2 and are available at the university’s Performing Arts Center box office, at venue on day of show, or by calling (360) 650-6146.