- OTHER MEDIA
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- Review by Robert Avila March 23, 2011 San Francisco Bay Guardian
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- Will Eno's plays (or at least the half-dozen I've seen and/or read)
tend toward being tongue-in-cheek questions about the relevance of theater,
whether as an art form, a social undertaking, or a compliment to dining
out. Self-consciousness is both a conceit and strategy here, the basis
for playing with inherited forms and conventions as well as an unevenly
successful but sometimes rich brand of humor. The best plays not only win
laughs but some pang of recognition, through a deft balancing of the profound
and the banal. The less successful plays devolve into pretentiousness and
sentimentality. In any case, the idea that the traditional theatrical stage
is being overturned can only be indulged if you consider a pretty small
section of it.
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- In Cutting Ball Theater's presentation of Will Eno's Lady Grey (in
ever lower light) and other plays it's those inconspicuous "other
plays" that are most worth seeing. Lady Grey, like the title suggests,
is a shadow of former glory, to wit, Eno's 2004 breakthrough play, Thom
Pain (based on nothing), whose structure — up to and including the
title itself — provides the template for this play. Cutting Ball had
deserved success with Thom Pain, thanks to actor Jonathan Bock, playing
no small part but a big and lonely one: the angry, tortured, sarcastic
young man who single-handedly holds the audience hostage for an hour or
so, assailing it with words, suspect memories, and bold staring contests.
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- Lady Grey calls for a similar fearlessness and fierceness, depositing
onstage something like a female version of Thom Pain to accost and cajole
the "audience" (here too much a written idea of one to avoid
those scare quotes) across the fourth wall. In the title and only role,
Danielle O'Hare, as directed by Cutting Ball's Rob Melrose, was inconsistent
if occasionally beguiling, rarely seeming to step out from behind the text,
or rather to completely own its conceit of not being a text. But Melrose
and O'Hare, who have done memorable work together in the past, are also
essaying a less inspired play. Grey adds up to a hit-and-miss series of
one-liners, not a very compelling total.
- The other two short plays that make up the fairly brisk evening prove
more rewarding. Intermission, which opens directly after one, is an amusing
and almost wise desultory conversation between an older couple (Gwyneth
Richards and David Sinaiko), and a younger one (Galen Murphy-Hoffman and
O'Hare), during the intermission of a seemingly tedious play about life
and death. Melrose gets superbly dry performances from his cast, doing
full justice to this light but cunning little play riffing on theater's
capacity for channeling yearning, regret, and blank obliviousness.
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- Cutting Ball regular Sinaiko then returns for the archly histrionic
monologue Mr. Theatre Comes Home Different, a piece that the actor —
playing an actor reveling in a state of decidedly Eno-esque self-consciousness
— rocks with utter conviction. It's a high note to end on and, for
all the seeming ambivalence and sentiment in this slice of Eno's oeuvre,
went perfectly well with dinner.
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