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Also this issue: Designer Threads Bryan Willette Forbidden Broadway Beauty and the Beast The Consul Paul Taylor Dance Co. John Simpson and Jesse Sheidlower of the OED Artsbeat |
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December 5-11, 2002
theater
“Let’s rent a video. Something awful. Something we can mock.”
When one of the characters suggests this, she not only reveals herself but reveals the whole world Jeffrey Sweet’s With and Without evokes, with its whole set of very predictable attitudes about morality and relationships. This group of friends (one might say Friends, if it were funny) has known each other a long time, but the actors are mostly too young-looking for their roles, so some confusion occurs as they talk about the old days when they were romantically involved with each other years and years ago after college, or the scene in New York for middle-aged divorced women.
The setting is the back porch of a vacation house in the country; two couples have rented it for a week to get away from the tension of their working lives, but that, needless to say, since this is a play and not a vacation, is not to be. One of the husbands hasn't shown up and is probably off somewhere with another woman, and his wife, Jill (Sarah Yorra), is very aggravated -- enough so that in the course of the evening she gives a friend a black eye and picks up a guy (Ray Germann) in a bar who turns out to be a bank robber. Well, not really a bank robber, but just some stupid schnook who robbed a bank. Jill used to be involved with Mark (Ted Schmitz), now Shelly's husband, "a smug self-righteous jerk" as Jill calls him with considerable justification. Mark is clearly having trouble with his old feelings for Jill.
Through all of this, Shelly keeps her head. Hettienne Park turns in a fine ironic and engaging performance as the understanding wife, the sympathetic friend, the solver of problems and the maker of food. While all the other characters speak in only one voice with the same tone -- Jill the shrill, man-hating self-pitying bitch, Mark the preachy over-explainer, Glenn the whiny sensitive guy -- she seems to be a likable, insightful, three-dimensional person, and it is to Park's credit that Shelly rises above the cardboard.
The moral of this overlong one-act seems to be that sometimes honesty isn't the best policy, which probably comes as a news flash to everyone in the audience under 10 years old.
Mark Cofta, who created a very plausible set on the Brick's tiny stage, ably directs.
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