TODAY: "Dying City"
An inauspicious official beginning to the trip. First, it's April, Easter is this Sunday...and it was SNOWING this morning! Second, tonight's show was a bit of a disappointment, especially for a writer. I hate to see a good text mangled by the actors. Well, if not exactly mangled, certainly not lifted to the level of art. The two actors, while skilled (after a fashion), simply failed to discover the humanity of the characters created by playwright Christopher Shinn.
The show is centered around the relationship of Kelly and a pair of identical twins, Peter and Craig. Craig and Kelly were married -- until Craig went off to Iraq (like so many Harvard grads) and died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. A year later, Peter barges in on Kelly, who's clearly been trying to avoid Peter.
The story unfolds rather nicely, as Shinn shifts the time back and forth between the night Peter intrudes on Kelly, and an earlier evening, the night before Craig was to head off for Iraq. Pablo Schreiber plays both brothers, and as the play moves forward, more and more details are revealed about the relationships between the three characters, and what happened between them to cause the tension we feel in the opening moments of the play, when the buzzer rings in Kelly's apartment and she discovers it's Peter downstairs.
As "Dying City" progresses, the stage itself moves. In fact, almost the entire stage (consisting of a couch and a TV on a stand in front of the couch) rotates ever...so...slooooowly throughout the course of the play, In fact, over the 90-minute intermissionless show, the set rotates exactly once. It's so slow you almost don't notice it (I had to have it pointed out to me first, and even then I didn't quite buy it), and then suddenly you realize that when you took your seat the couch was facing an entirely different direction.
Lincoln Center does its usual excellent job with production -- I'm just disappointed the director and the actors couldn't give the characters the sense of truth and dimension that I believe is there in the text.
TOMORROW: "Blackbird" and "Journey's End"
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