Future Perfect

The Dos and Don'ts of Time Travel

by Mark Cofta

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Published: Oct 7, 2008

Jackie Jacobson IT'S ABOUT TIME: Rachel (Amanda Schoonover, left) and Zoey (Kate Brennan) get metaphysical in Straw Flower Productions' The Dos and Don'ts of Time Travel. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Time-travel movies have a "common intrinsic problem," asserts grad student Rachel: "They all suck." Rachel entertainingly debunks the genre while also discovering the real thing in Straw Flower Productions' première of Nicholas Wardigo's The Dos and Don'ts of Time Travel. Time travel, according to Rachel, is achieved in movies through one of three forces: machination, nature and will, and she describes examples of each, including some advanced ideas on wormholes. Her fervor, expressed by Amanda Schoonover (finally playing a role not adolescent, crazy or both, in yet another mesmerizing performance), entertains successfully — especially for science fiction geeks like me, for whom theater offers little except a few neglected works by George Bernard Shaw and J.B. Priestley.

Rachel's metaphors for time (an ocean rather than a stream, not a line but a plane) and her straightforward insights on Einstein and relativity show Wardigo's skill at making heady concepts clear and personal. The uninitiated glean enough from her pithy lectures to appreciate her clever skewering of scientifically sloppy time-travel films like Somewhere in Time and The Lake House ("Its suck," Rachel opines, "is blinding").

The Dos and Don'ts has more at stake, though: Rachel is involved with Zoey (Kate Brennan and Jen Jaynes), who, by methods eventually clarified, travels through time to care for her lover, Claire (Sarah Milici), dying of cancer at age 29. Why two actresses? Because Zoey runs into herself more than once on her 18 laps through Claire's last two years (each one slightly different from the others), bringing up another fascinating debate inspired by Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame: A simple conversation, Zoey realizes, "dissolves into metaphysics: What pronoun do you use when you talk to yourself?" How do the Zoeys share events that are past for one and future for the other? It's a surprisingly fun problem, and the blue-wigged Brennan and Jaynes make Zoey a likably zany character (or two).

Director John V. Bellomo's production handles time very well, whisking us wittily from scene to scene using near-identical stagehands Chris and Steven Barber, despite some awkward sets (a Laundromat suggested by three washing machines turned upstage, trapping the action in a corner) on the Playground's thrust stage.

Also worthy of praise is Wardigo's decision to make The Dos and Don'ts a four-woman play; part of science fiction's marginalization stems from the mistaken assumption that it's only by, for and about boys.

Most importantly, Bellomo reveals the emotional issues driving these characters (as Firesign Theatre aptly quipped): "forward into the past." Though Wardigo's script eventually abandons Rachel's amusing direct-address treatise, it builds to a fascinating tangle of time-travel problems between the Zoeys and their ties to Rachel and Claire. The Dos and Don'ts of Time Travel begins like a play only a science fiction geek could love, but ends as a powerful love story.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

The Dos and Don'ts of Time Travel | Through Oct. 19, Straw Flower Productions, Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-551-3376, strawflower.org

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