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Walnut's 'Natural History'
Dan Rottenberg
A failure to communicate (yet again)
DAN ROTTENBERG
When you spend a lot of time hanging around the Museum of Natural History, you can be forgiven for obsessing about how effectively whales and other mammals communicate and, conversely, how poorly humans communicate. Playwright Jennifer Camp, who has maybe spent too much time hanging out at the famous New York dinosaur shrine, offers a half-dozen vignettes on this theme, all set in the museum and some of which work better than others. My favorites were the opening scene, in which two regular museum patrons— a shy geek (Russ Widdall) and well-tailored British professor (Wendy Scharfman)— spend weeks working up the courage to approach each other; and the finale, in which a divorced couple (Widdall and Scharfman again) confront each other as well as her new and much younger lover (Evan Jonigkeit). Camp's 90-minute work allows the cast’s three actors to demonstrate their versatility in three roles each, especially the blonde, leggy Scharfman, who compels your attention through several accents and costume changes; and Studio’s 3’s in-the-round setup works perfectly here: You feel you’re in the museum yourself, eavesdropping on people who stand and sit literally just a few feet away.
Camp’s script provides a few very funny moments and a few poignant ones, but much of the territory she covers seems like familiar ground. Granted, our failure to communicate may be humans’ most pressing flaw. But as someone who probably spends more time in theaters than natural history museums, I can’t help wondering: Why do people so often seem to communicate worse on stage than they do in real life?
To view responses to this review, click here.
DAN ROTTENBERG
When you spend a lot of time hanging around the Museum of Natural History, you can be forgiven for obsessing about how effectively whales and other mammals communicate and, conversely, how poorly humans communicate. Playwright Jennifer Camp, who has maybe spent too much time hanging out at the famous New York dinosaur shrine, offers a half-dozen vignettes on this theme, all set in the museum and some of which work better than others. My favorites were the opening scene, in which two regular museum patrons— a shy geek (Russ Widdall) and well-tailored British professor (Wendy Scharfman)— spend weeks working up the courage to approach each other; and the finale, in which a divorced couple (Widdall and Scharfman again) confront each other as well as her new and much younger lover (Evan Jonigkeit). Camp's 90-minute work allows the cast’s three actors to demonstrate their versatility in three roles each, especially the blonde, leggy Scharfman, who compels your attention through several accents and costume changes; and Studio’s 3’s in-the-round setup works perfectly here: You feel you’re in the museum yourself, eavesdropping on people who stand and sit literally just a few feet away.
Camp’s script provides a few very funny moments and a few poignant ones, but much of the territory she covers seems like familiar ground. Granted, our failure to communicate may be humans’ most pressing flaw. But as someone who probably spends more time in theaters than natural history museums, I can’t help wondering: Why do people so often seem to communicate worse on stage than they do in real life?
To view responses to this review, click here.
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