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magidLast night I saw Stop Kiss (Diana Son), put on by the HRDC at the Loeb Ex. It's about two women discovering that they have an attraction, and the horrific consequences when some brute beats them up for it, one of them into a coma. Which doesn't sound like it would be light, and it isn't, but there are lots of lighter moments.
The theater was set up with the audience on two opposite sides, and the space in the middle being anchored at each end by half the set. One end is the livingroom (with Henry the couch, playing himself, who got his own line in the program), the other the hospital room, with fluid space in between that became a police office, a bench, a cafe. This worked rather well, because the story is not told chronologically, but cuts back and forth between before and after the assault (each part being chronological, however). The part that felt out of place was how the characters took a moment on the bench in the middle when transitioning from one end to the other. It was superfluous; we could tell the difference in the set. And it took time, which added up. (There was no intermission, and it ran almost two hours.)
The actors were... medium. None of them shone, none were horrible. I think whoever cast them wasn't thinking about the particulars of the script as much as they might have, though. There's talk of the two women wearing each other's clothing, which was clearly impossible, and it was laughable when the one came out with a skirt of the other's that would have fallen off her body. The out-of-town ex asks at one point if the assailant was larger than him, and that got a laugh, because he's so slight (not short, but reedy skinny, so the line fell incredibly flat). Not what was intended, I'm sure.
The other decision I found odd was the choice to have a lot of the sound between scenes be not music, but exerpts from Talk of the Nation, mostly Science Friday. It was distracting, all that discussion, expecially because I kept trying to figure out why they'd chosen that. (I still have no clue.)
It felt like the play raised a lot of questions/discussions, about sexuality, about identity, about relationships and the stresses they can take (can longer relationships take more?), but didn't even start towards answers. The play ends before even a first decision is made, which leaves plenty of room for talking (and fanfic?), but also made it feel almost like it was some sort of educational play, requiring that discussion afterward to come to completion, rather than a thing in and of itself.
The theater was set up with the audience on two opposite sides, and the space in the middle being anchored at each end by half the set. One end is the livingroom (with Henry the couch, playing himself, who got his own line in the program), the other the hospital room, with fluid space in between that became a police office, a bench, a cafe. This worked rather well, because the story is not told chronologically, but cuts back and forth between before and after the assault (each part being chronological, however). The part that felt out of place was how the characters took a moment on the bench in the middle when transitioning from one end to the other. It was superfluous; we could tell the difference in the set. And it took time, which added up. (There was no intermission, and it ran almost two hours.)
The actors were... medium. None of them shone, none were horrible. I think whoever cast them wasn't thinking about the particulars of the script as much as they might have, though. There's talk of the two women wearing each other's clothing, which was clearly impossible, and it was laughable when the one came out with a skirt of the other's that would have fallen off her body. The out-of-town ex asks at one point if the assailant was larger than him, and that got a laugh, because he's so slight (not short, but reedy skinny, so the line fell incredibly flat). Not what was intended, I'm sure.
The other decision I found odd was the choice to have a lot of the sound between scenes be not music, but exerpts from Talk of the Nation, mostly Science Friday. It was distracting, all that discussion, expecially because I kept trying to figure out why they'd chosen that. (I still have no clue.)
It felt like the play raised a lot of questions/discussions, about sexuality, about identity, about relationships and the stresses they can take (can longer relationships take more?), but didn't even start towards answers. The play ends before even a first decision is made, which leaves plenty of room for talking (and fanfic?), but also made it feel almost like it was some sort of educational play, requiring that discussion afterward to come to completion, rather than a thing in and of itself.