Limited Perspective

My review has hit a dead end. So anyway, this show is really good and super funny and you might cry-laugh at some of the beautiful moments. Here's my unfinished draft ... Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England The essential thread of Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England involves two characters named Early Man 1 and Early Man 2. An unnamed fancy liberal arts college is closing down its museum. No one goes there anymore. Its history is random and absurd. The show opens with lights-up on the museum’s life-size diorama of Early Man 1 and Early Man 2 in fur and leather costumes that might remind you of Barbarella. The couple comes to life. It turns out they talk exactly like liberal arts college students from about 2011. They talk about student loans. They analyze their on-again-off-again relationship. They take Xanax. They appear this way, Greek chorus-style, several times, never directly interacting with the other characters. You might be able to dismiss the pa...

Chocolate Hearts at the Slate You don’t see a lot of plays about characters at the end of an arc. Or at least that’s not where they start out. Everyone does seem to start there though in all three plays by John Ruoff going under the title Chocolate Hearts, produced by James Oliver Burrows’ World Stage now playing at the Slate. In Confessions of the Cocoa Luna, three Americans have run away to Costa Rica late in life after things have hit dead ends. One is almost literally  sleepwalking in the cabana while the other two, played by John Murray and Connie Murray, look back and forth between the moon and their regrets. Murray and Murray basically reprise their roles in the second play, the eponymous Chocolate Hearts. Connie as two-time widow Meg becomes a sort of late-middle-age manic pixie dream girl who snaps John Murray as dentist Dr. Doug Smile (really) out of his funk. They meet in a cemetery where Doug has come to visit his wife’s grave. There is a sweet moment at the e...

Here's your review of Prelude to a Kiss, by Strawberry Theatre Workshop, now playing at 12th Avenue Arts, which I saw tonight. The company had begun producing Reckless but decided late in the process that it was not the show they wanted to do. So I asked one of the actors at the opening night reception afterward how it was to have less than three weeks to prepare for a show. He said they all just jumped in. That full speed ahead, all-in attitude was evident from the first moment of the show. It was as if they had been doing it for weeks. Strong choices. Fully formed characters. I was sucked right in. MJ Sieber is a lovable puppy dog as Peter. Anastasia Higham as Rita falls hard for him -- or maybe she's been waiting for him a long time -- in the opening scene, where they meet, as if by accident, at a party. Later, as if by another accident, Rita has switched bodies with an old man. Each tries to live the other's life. The theme of the show, based on everythi...

Communicating Doors What if you could do it all over again and have it come out differently? The answer, according to Communicating Doors, as produced by Lamplight Productions at the Ballard Underground is: it would be really funny, somewhat scary, and a little bit poignant. Communicating Doors is written by Alan Ayckbourn, known mostly, I suppose, for farces. And there are elements of farce in the play. There are misunderstandings and secrets and people coming in and out of doors at the worst possible times. There’s a clueless buffoon security guard, a dominatrix, a couple of newlyweds on their honeymoon – and the show takes full comic advantage of all of those. There is also a doorway to the past and to the future that allows the characters to explore, if unwittingly at first, the question: what if we could foresee and then maybe avoid the bad outcomes in our life? Each of the three women in the story gets to choose, while each of the three men remains (at least for a tim...