Posts Tagged ‘subway’
‘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.
