The Funny Pages
Itamar Moses' time-hopping The Four of Us examines friendship, memory, storytelling and success
; "TWO OF FOUR: Jeb Kreager and Matt Pfeiffer in 1812's <i>The Four of Us</i>.")
TWO OF FOUR: Jeb Kreager and Matt Pfeiffer in 1812's The Four of Us. : Jacques-Jean Tiziou/ www.jtiziou.com (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
They call themselves "Philadelphia's all-comedy theater company" but 1812 Productions is after more than just laughs. The East Coast premiere of Itamar Moses' time-hopping The Four of Us examines friendship, memory, storytelling and success with insight, poignancy, surprises — and, of course, wit.
Matt Pfeiffer plays David, a struggling playwright, and Jeb Kreager is Ben, a suddenly successful novelist. In the first scene, David wrestles with his envy while Ben seems underwhelmed. He's "too fucking pop-culture illiterate to appreciate" the celebrities he's suddenly meeting, David accuses, unconsoled by landing his first professional production in a tiny Indiana theater.
Some hilarious scenes follow — Ben's Q&A sessions at readings, David's scathing condemnation of a small town's caustic critics and Ben's rant against egotistical would-be novelists, Ben's graphic re-creation (with a giant teddy bear) of David's one-night-stand — all staged cleverly by director Pete Pryor. Jorge Cousineau's inventive set begins as a schoolkid's composition book standing on end, each a page a new location. The entire stage is gray — the new black, in theater circles — until a key twist brings forth a burst of color and an even greater test of David and Ben's friendship.
Moses — whose successes include Outrage, produced two years ago by the Wilma Theater, a play as sprawling as The Four of Us is intimate — shows events as memories first, then reveals how they occurred, moving deeper into the story while chronologically regressing. The play's surprises lie not in what occurs, but in how and why we got to now — that "now" being yet another surprise.
Pfeiffer and Kreager make these machinations look easy, moving seamlessly backward and forward in time, from the "young musicians' camp" where they met as teenagers, through college life and into adulthood challenges. Kreager creates a Zen demeanor for Ben that seems the key to his success, a lack of anxiety that Pfeiffer's twitchy David seems destined never to grasp — until each reveals surprising depths.
Pryor's production moves briskly through assistant stage manager Christopher Butterfield, who plays a variety of silent characters while opening each scene's "page" in the set's "book." Paul Peyton Moffitt lights all splendidly, and Charlotte Cloe Fox Wind's costumes understated costumes reveal much about Ben and David.
If our lives unfold like books, who's doing the writing — and editing? We might attend 1812's productions for laughs, but we leave The Four of Us with much more to contemplate.
The Four of Us
Through June 171812 ProductionsSt. Stephen's Theatre10th and Ludlow streets215-592-9560, www.1812productions.org
Also In This Week's Arts Section
Comments
Be the first to comment on this article.