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Fringe Festival: "Widow's Blind Date' (2nd r
Steve Cohen
A tedious game of cat-and-mouse
STEVE COHEN
One of the best aspects of Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival is the showing of smallish plays by itinerant theater companies. Sometimes this spotlight reveals hidden gems. When one such company, Green Light Productions, mounts a play by Israel Horovitz, it draws our interest, especially because the group gave us an excellent production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig last year.
But The Widow's Blind Date is diametrically different from the same playwright's Lebensraum, a drama I enjoyed when InterAct Theatre produced it in 1999.
Horovitz's Lebensraum examined the effects of the Holocaust on today's world with subtlety and humor, with a small cast portraying 50 characters. The Widow's Blind Date, on the other hand, involves just three characters, set in a claustrophobic Boston junkyard. It presents two working-class buddies who fight with each other but cling to an odd friendship.
They are contacted by an old female schoolmate who married well and moved away from the area. The contrasts between her way of life and the boys' is obvious. So we wonder why she wants to get together again with these lugs. It’s clear that she has an agenda, and the mechanics of the play's structure are equally obvious.
So the cat-and-mouse game soon grows tedious. The script offers us scant reason to empathize with the men, and the woman is a deus ex machina more than a flesh-and-blood person.
I won't spoil things for prospective playgoers by disclosing the secret. Suffice it to say that playwright Horovitz drops clues along the way, and there is logic in the shocking payoff. But it is so extreme that it is almost absurd.
The cast struggles valiantly with the material. Kirsten Quinn is particularly good, although most of the lines that she is given are reactive. Accents are crucial to understanding the people here— and the working-class Boston accents of the two men, Nathan Emmons and Gene d'Alessandro, are unconvincing.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
STEVE COHEN
One of the best aspects of Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival is the showing of smallish plays by itinerant theater companies. Sometimes this spotlight reveals hidden gems. When one such company, Green Light Productions, mounts a play by Israel Horovitz, it draws our interest, especially because the group gave us an excellent production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig last year.
But The Widow's Blind Date is diametrically different from the same playwright's Lebensraum, a drama I enjoyed when InterAct Theatre produced it in 1999.
Horovitz's Lebensraum examined the effects of the Holocaust on today's world with subtlety and humor, with a small cast portraying 50 characters. The Widow's Blind Date, on the other hand, involves just three characters, set in a claustrophobic Boston junkyard. It presents two working-class buddies who fight with each other but cling to an odd friendship.
They are contacted by an old female schoolmate who married well and moved away from the area. The contrasts between her way of life and the boys' is obvious. So we wonder why she wants to get together again with these lugs. It’s clear that she has an agenda, and the mechanics of the play's structure are equally obvious.
So the cat-and-mouse game soon grows tedious. The script offers us scant reason to empathize with the men, and the woman is a deus ex machina more than a flesh-and-blood person.
I won't spoil things for prospective playgoers by disclosing the secret. Suffice it to say that playwright Horovitz drops clues along the way, and there is logic in the shocking payoff. But it is so extreme that it is almost absurd.
The cast struggles valiantly with the material. Kirsten Quinn is particularly good, although most of the lines that she is given are reactive. Accents are crucial to understanding the people here— and the working-class Boston accents of the two men, Nathan Emmons and Gene d'Alessandro, are unconvincing.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
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