If you’ve ever found yourself walking on eggshells around your spouse or partner, perhaps you’re in a-delicate-ship versus a relationship. Or, you’re at the Something, Something Theater Company in Tucson when one of Anna Ziegler’s plays, A Delicate Ship, is performed under the direction of founding artistic director Joan O’Dwyer. That’s where Kevin and I were for the matinee performance Sunday, Jan. 7. To set the stage and atmosphere, think Holden Caulfield meets Gatsby while Garth Brooks is singing a country & western song. Characters Sarah (Daisy) and Sam (Garth) are celebrating their three-month dating anniversary on Christmas Eve, when Nate (Holden) — a lifelong friend of Sarah’s -- barges in on the couple’s quiet evening at home. In the not-so-quiet and not-so-predictable 80 minutes that follows, each suffers an existential crisis about the meaning of life. The screenplay allows direct addresses to the audience, and helps fill in characters’ backgrounds, insecurities, and futures. Although the characters have their own intimacies with each other, the audience is told secrets the other characters don’t hear. Such moments are frozen in time: one actor speaks an inner monologue while the other two remain fixed in place during the temporary explanation/confession/neurosis. Nate, played by Nicholas Watts, is the high energy jerk who crashes the couple’s holiday evening. In previous roles, Watts has played Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and R.P. McMurphy in One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Here, his chronic refusal to grow up turns Sarah into his only avenue for keeping adulthood at bay. The object of affection of both men, Sarah, is juggled by Shira Elena Maas, an actress with an MFA from the University of Arizona who has performed in roles such as Eva Peron in Evita. According to the playbill, Sam is performed by Stephen J. Dunham, a father of a 5-year-old who “will be playing a singing mouse in his school’s upcoming winter performance” as well as a graduate of the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. The set includes two doors, one to the outside world and one to Sarah’s bedroom, a living room couch and chair, a Christmas tree, and a cheap bar made of wire and glass, one that could easily have been purchased from a local department store. Often, the characters look to their drinks for a response or a respite from the excruciating pain of how to live and move on. After this night of harrowing interpersonal hit-and-runs mixed with liquor and individual angst, the three part ways. None will go on to live the life they would have imagined themselves to live that evening, nor will they able to sustain the same relationship with each other; each of their lives will discreetly turn toward their destined directions. The rest of their lives delicately pivot on that singular space in time. After the show, the three performers and director fielded questions from the audience. Dunham, a self-taught guitarist, said he created the guitar music for the lines Sam sings in the play. “There was no music written for the words,” he said. At first, Watts said, he pegged his character Nate as an “immature brat” until he realized over the course of rehearsals that “he is an only child whose parents gave him everything he wanted.” The real world, Watts said, could never live up to what Nate’s parents prepared him for. “Look what you get when you give your children everything." The small, community theatre seats about 60 - 70 people, and some chairs are inches from the stage. It’s intimate and comfortable in such a way that the 20 or so people who stayed afterward to talk to the performers couldn’t avoid speaking one-on-one with them, and even shaking hands, as they navigated their exit from the building. The theatre shows only female productions, “not because we don’t like males,” O’Dwyer said before the play began. Because only 20 percent of screenplays performed on Broadway are written by women, she said the company is simply trying to compensate for the paucity.
2 Comments
Deborah
1/11/2018 07:05:59 am
Great writing and interesting play! Would love to go to one sometime!
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Barbara
1/22/2018 03:49:32 pm
Your review made me want to see the play. I like it when characters direct themselves to the audience and let us in on something the other characters don’t know yet or maybe ever. In some ways this play reminds me of one we saw years ago in NYC, “ADelicate Balance.” Some friends show up unannounced and don’t plan to leave. They’re afraid—of the world and dying. Anyway, an excellent review, Michelle!
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AuthorMy name is Michelle Harmon, and this blog is my Arizona travelogue. Archives
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