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Fringe Festival: "Widow's Blind Date' (1st review)
Jim Rutter
He's no Steinbeck
JIM RUTTER
Israel Horovitz has received a number of good productions of his plays in Philadelphia, from Interact’s Barrymore Award-winning staging of Lebensraum to Luna Theatre’s recent Line. When I saw that Green Light Productions planned to stage The Widow’s Blind Date—never performed in Philly before—I put it at the top of my list of Fringe must-sees.
But the perils of expectation caught up with me. Horovitz set his play in a wastepaper processing plant outside of Boston, where two friends from high school—Archie (Nathan Emmons) and George (Gene D’Alessandro)— work on a weekend night, reminiscing about their high school days and sexual conquests for what seemed like an interminable amount of time.
They keep this up until Margy (Kirsten Quinn)—one of Archie’s old girlfriends—arrives. She indulges in their bickering and one-upmanship for the better part of an hour before she reveals not only her contempt, but a larger secret about why she’s returned. Throughout, I couldn’t understand why someone so successful (she’s gone on to work at NYU) would tolerate and participate in the rehashing of high school days, let alone hang out in a “junkyard” with a pair of losers. And despite Quinn’s crafted performance, by the time her darker motives surfaced I couldn’t have cared much less.
Aside from Archie’s volatile outbursts of rage, they’re little different from Lenny and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And even if Horovitz intended this comparison, he’s no Steinbeck. Archie and George may be a pair of a pair of lunks, but I can easily imagine a better playwright—like Mamet or Labute—turning their misogynistic machismo into something far more appealing (or at least funnier) than director John Gallagher managed in this production.
I had enjoyed Horovitz’s work—and Green Light’s Fringe shows—in the past, but The Widow’s Blind Date marked the worst show I’ve seen in this year’s Fringe so far. For a festival that includes many productions created seemingly at random on shoestring budgets, that’s a major disappointment.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
JIM RUTTER
Israel Horovitz has received a number of good productions of his plays in Philadelphia, from Interact’s Barrymore Award-winning staging of Lebensraum to Luna Theatre’s recent Line. When I saw that Green Light Productions planned to stage The Widow’s Blind Date—never performed in Philly before—I put it at the top of my list of Fringe must-sees.
But the perils of expectation caught up with me. Horovitz set his play in a wastepaper processing plant outside of Boston, where two friends from high school—Archie (Nathan Emmons) and George (Gene D’Alessandro)— work on a weekend night, reminiscing about their high school days and sexual conquests for what seemed like an interminable amount of time.
They keep this up until Margy (Kirsten Quinn)—one of Archie’s old girlfriends—arrives. She indulges in their bickering and one-upmanship for the better part of an hour before she reveals not only her contempt, but a larger secret about why she’s returned. Throughout, I couldn’t understand why someone so successful (she’s gone on to work at NYU) would tolerate and participate in the rehashing of high school days, let alone hang out in a “junkyard” with a pair of losers. And despite Quinn’s crafted performance, by the time her darker motives surfaced I couldn’t have cared much less.
Aside from Archie’s volatile outbursts of rage, they’re little different from Lenny and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And even if Horovitz intended this comparison, he’s no Steinbeck. Archie and George may be a pair of a pair of lunks, but I can easily imagine a better playwright—like Mamet or Labute—turning their misogynistic machismo into something far more appealing (or at least funnier) than director John Gallagher managed in this production.
I had enjoyed Horovitz’s work—and Green Light’s Fringe shows—in the past, but The Widow’s Blind Date marked the worst show I’ve seen in this year’s Fringe so far. For a festival that includes many productions created seemingly at random on shoestring budgets, that’s a major disappointment.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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