- OTHER MEDIA
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- Attrition for the Sins of Living
- by Albert Goodwyn
October 18, 2007
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- In Ambit Theatre’s new play Attrition, four voices in disjointed,
rotational sequences deliver recollections of their lives, whether current
or long-term. The result, in an hour, turns into a linear whole. This is
an awesome feat, because only two of the characters are related, or even
know each other. The convicted felon’s story becomes as poignant as
the teenage girl’s complaints, and it seems to take on equal emotional
weight with the anomie of the middle-age daughter and the senile senescence
of her poet mother.
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- The characters are identified only as voice numbers one, two, three,
or four; fortunately they don’t change. On the EXIT Taylor stage,
on four platforms of varying levels, they invoked a litany calling for
a response from another character. Over the course of the play, the nature
of each character’s personal life became apparent. There is a dramatic
thrust to this enactment. The characters appear stereotyped at first, but,
as we learn details of their lives, we become attracted to them.
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- While the middle-age executive daughter (Cheryl Smith) goes through
details of her two failed marriages and her love/hate relationship with
her professional career, her poet mother (Carol Flanagan) complains that
she cannot remember what she meant when she pores over paper piles of her
poems, some of them blank. The teenage girl (Samantha Cooper) moans about
her parents’ restrictions on her. The guy (Leo I. Rodriguez) talks
with self-pity about his failures that got him into prison.
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- The four characters on their separate platforms talk independently,
with no verbal interactions, but their stories mesh with an emotional fervency.
The young girl tells of sexual abuse by a family member while the grandmotherly
poet talks about the poems she never wrote about incest. The guy talks
about why he shot a rapist. The daughter talks about her short marriages
and how she decided to go sky diving at age forty-two. In a climactic scene,
the guy becomes frenetically distressed, the girl tries to commit suicide
with scissors, the woman wonders what might have gone wrong with her sky
diving adventure, and the poet makes the only connection during the play
by throwing her a poem. But all her words had been stolen from her.
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- This is a stylized, heavily emotional effort written and directed by
Marilee Talkington, a recent graduate of ACT’s MFA program. The musicality
of the contrapuntal dialogue plays against a soundscape of barely audible,
eerie effects and whispers. The set design makes effective use of the theater’s
wide and shallow stage. The actors were well cast and are physically appropriate
to convey their parts. Some opening night stiffness was evident, but the
play’s material is so strong as to overcome all staging difficulties.
Theatre is voyeurism. This is a wrenching insight into the lives of some
characters we probably do not know, but might like to.
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