Posts Tagged ‘New York City’
‘The Disappearance of Jonah’
The Disappearance of Jonah
The Shop at Fort Fringe
Remaining Shows:
Thursday, July 24 @ 6:00 PM; Friday, July 25 @ 8:30 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 5:00 PM; Sunday, July 27 @ 12:30 PM
They say: “When small town golden boy Jonah Thompson moves to New York City, he dreams that the city will be his playground but soon he disappears. Two years later his brother Finn sets out to find Jonah, or at least some answers.”
Brett’s take: It’s painful to review a show that clearly has benefited from hours upon hours of effort and attention from thoughtful, hardworking people (who have traveled to D.C. from New York) but that nevertheless leaves you cold. You can see the conviction in the actor’s faces, hear it in their voices, and even see it in the way one of the leads’ limbs shake with apparent nervousness before going into a big scene. But sincerity can’t save this production from pretentiousness and hollowness.
The plot concerns… well, the disappearance of a college student named Jonah. It leaps back and forth from the time leading up to that event and some years afterwards (two years, as far as I could grasp), when Jonah’s younger brother Finn goes to New York City to search for him on Jonah’s birthday. In quick succession, we meet a coterie of educated New York characters, including a writer, a professor, a photographer/physics student, and an aspiring actress/waitress, all of whom had some connection with Jonah and all of whom begin to have new connections to each other. Just why these new connections start happening right when Finn is arriving at the city – besides convenience for writer Darragh Martin- is an unanswered question that points to the problems with the play.
‘Four Rooms Waking’
Four Rooms Waking
Studio Theatre
Remaining performances:
Thursday, July 24 @ 6:00 PM; Saturday, July 26 @ 9:00 PM; Sunday, July 27 @ 6:00 PM
They say: A one-of-a-kind theatrical experience, Four Rooms Waking captures one gripping day in the lives of four sets of unique characters. By turns haunted and hilarious, they will lead you from Algiers to London, New York to Havana – questioning sexuality and nationality, war and liberation. Will love or necessity hold sway?
Chris’s take: One palpable trend in contemporary theater has been the slicing and splicing of multiple narratives. In Arcadia Tom Stoppard cleverly weaves together scenes set in a Derbyshire country manor in 1809 and the present day; in 33 Variations Moisés Kaufman similarly but less cleverly weaves together the life of Beethoven, circa 1819, and a contemporary musicologist’s efforts to unravel the past. In the same vein, Four Rooms Waking tells four stories, each set in a different room at a different time and place: Algiers, 1955; Oxford, 1964; New York City, 1967; and Havana, 1975.
The interspersed short scenes offer glimpses of each of the four narratives, none of which feels fully elaborated. Each story line resembles (but really isn’t) a love story in which a woman desires a man. In Algiers, as the National Liberation Fronts fights to oust the French, an Algerian woman who’s been protecting a wounded French soldier struggles with whether to kill him. In Oxford, an anthropologist dreams of a “birdman,” who embodies her Kenyan lover. In New York City, a closeted lesbian pines for a hometown boyfriend, who unlike her has embraced his homosexuality. In Havana, a woman’s lover comes back from the war in Angola too shaken to readjust. If there’s a thread running through these vignettes it’s the practical impossibility of each relationship.
