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Christina
Kirk and Thomas Jay Ryan in Suitcase |
Reviews Jan 26, 2004
New York
Reviewed By: Dan Bacalzo
Melissa James Gibson is one of the most original
and entertaining new playwrights to emerge in recent years. Her latest work, Suitcase
or, those that resemble flies from a distance, is hilarious, offbeat,
and oddly moving. Like her last play, the critically acclaimed and equally
quirky [sic], it features a terrific ensemble cast and is superbly
directed by Soho Rep artistic director Daniel Aukin.
Suitcase is a play about avoidance: Jen (Colleen Werthmann)
and Sallie (Christina Kirk) are graduate students purportedly working on their
dissertations, but very little writing actually gets done. Jen's subject is
garbage -- or, as another character describes her thesis, "[she] believes
what we discard is of much greater interest than what we keep." Sallie,
meanwhile, is writing about alternative forms of storytelling that do not
conform to the standard beginning-middle-end construct. The title of her opus:
"Narrative Interruptus."
The two women are best friends and live in the same
building, yet they seem to communicate with each other primarily by phone. They
call each other up at all hours of the day or night and, without preamble,
launch into conversations that include lines like, "Tell me if this sounds
pretentious but I'm beginning to see my romantic life as alarmingly
Aristotelian." Their phone talk is amplified, allowing the actors to speak
in soft, almost dreamlike tones that are at once intimate and alienating.
In addition to avoiding writing and avoiding talking
to their academic advisors, Jen and Sallie also avoid their boyfriends, who
show up at their building and try to convince the pair to buzz them in. Karl
(Jeremy Shamos), Jen's beau, goes into a hiccupping fit when trying to propose
and has a policy of not talking about emotions while on the phone. Lyle (Thomas
Jay Ryan), Sallie's boyfriend, seems to be the least neurotic of the four
characters -- although he too has his quirks, such as a habit of substituting
words like "effing" for the profanities that he really wants to use.
Under Aukin's able direction, the ensemble cast
revels in the musicality of Gibson's language. There is plenty of overlap in
the characters' dialogue, as well as multiple conversations happening
simultaneously. The cast handles such challenges with a linguistic deftness
that boggles the mind; intentions and emotions are conveyed less through words
than through the stresses, pauses, and intonations of the actors. One scene is
played out entirely with the four characters saying one another's names in
different combinations, yet the action and emotional tenor of the sequence are
crystal clear. But the characters themselves do become confused, and their
constant miscommunication is another way in which the author plays with
language. As Lyle attempts to have a serious talk with Sallie, he tells her
that, "in one's life there are only so many significant cusps" --
which Sallie hears as "significant cuffs." She then says, "I was
trying to figure out what a Significant Cuff would be. Maybe like on a
bloodstained shirt at a crime scene or something."
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Colleen
Werthman in Suitcase |
Louisa Thompson's set design positions Jen and Sallie
on elevated platforms. Each sits at a cluttered desk, surrounded by swingarm
desk lamps. Behind them, the audience can see the tenements located across the
street from their building, finely rendered with miniature fire escapes and
windows through which miniature pieces of furniture are visible. Sallie has a
habit of using a pair of binoculars to spy on her neighbors as they watch home
movies; a flickering light appears in one of the miniature apartments courtesy
of lighting designer Matthew Frey, and the film itself is projected onto the
back wall of the set thanks to projection designer Elaine J. McCarthy.
Karl and Lyle's apartments are symbolically placed
underneath their respective girlfriends' desks, and the two male actors go in
and out of a glass door placed up stage center to mark their entering or
exiting the womens' apartment building. Occasionally, the two men meet up on
the stairs or in the building corridor; these encounters are the most
physically active in the production, as the women remain behind their desks for
almost the entire play.
Presented as a co-production between Soho Rep and
True Love Productions, Suitcase is compellingly theatrical without
resorting to a traditional play structure or, on the other hand, coming across
as overly abstract. It captures the dissatisfaction of its overeducated
characters, who attempt to find meaning through deciphering each others' words
and intentions but rarely through the act of human contact.