..
.home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives ..

[sic]
Melissa James Gibson

    Melissa James Gibson has written a very funny, moving, strange play. Why it bears the title it does must remain, for the moment, a mystery, but it might be subtitled "Friends: The Reality Check" since the play bears a superficial resemblance to the popular TV sitcom.
    Three young next-door neighbors in a New York apartment building--two men, one woman--have become, if not friends, at least entangled, bearing out the old saying that propinquity makes strange bedfellows. Theo is a composer. He has been commissioned, if that's the word, by an amusement park to write theme music for a ride called Thrill-o-Rama. His self-imposed goal is to write something truly dull and boring so that after hearing the music the ride will be all the more thrilling. Babette has great plans for publishing her compendium of verbal outbursts. Not famous outbursts necessarily, just examples of the phenomenon. Frank is immersed in a home-study course, complete with book and tape, on how to become an auctioneer.
    Since this is off-Broadway and most members of the audience are engrossed in projects equally creative/daft/hopeless/hopeful, the projects of these three come to seem not so strange. On the surface not all that much happens. Gibson is, in this sense, a modern-day, urban Chekhov. Her characters complain, natter, whine, much as Chekhov's do, and then by a circuitous route sneak up on the audience with a powerful impact or insight. Gibson uses language brilliantly, creating a sort of verbal kaleidoscope, with words and sentences seeming to cluster and then spin apart, and then come back together again in new meanings. Frank, in practicing to be an auctioneer, does tongue-twisters that have the power of oddly affecting chants. His riff on the plight of Betty Botter, her sad encounter with bitter butter, and her courageous search for better butter, seems to encapsulate one of the themes of the play.
    The acting is excellent. Dominic Fumusa is Theo, the aspiring composer, and he plays his luckless quest to make Babette his girlfriend with intensity and single mindedness. He makes Theo's mission to write something really dull seem logical. Christina Kirk's Babette is an understated waif trying to connect with people by borrowing money from them. They can't drop her, she seems to believe, if she still owes them a few dollars. James Urbaniak, as Frank, the would-be auctioneer, is hilarious. As a young gay man hopelessly enamored of a cold-fish gallery owner, he makes his dark secret (his seemingly out of character desire to go off to Kansas City to finish his auctioneering course) utterly believable.
    This play could be performed with just these three characters, but there are in fact two others. Here something must be said about the set. The main acting area is about six feet above the level of the first row of the theatre. On this platform are three apartments, each one the size and shape of a slightly over-large, old fashioned phone booth. There's room to stand up, room to sit down, but not much more. It takes a few minutes to get used to this, but since so many New York apartments are, in fact, not all that much larger, it soon seems perfectly reasonable.
    But, stranger still, below this six-foot-high platform is another apartment in more or less full size. In this apartment is a couple. Theo, Babette, and Frank are obsessed with eavesdropping on them, but they hear only scraps. It soon becomes clear that they are not getting scraps of a full and interesting relationship, but that the relationship below is made up only, and sadly, of scraps. If this were music by a better composer than Theo, these scraps would make up a dark theme echoing through the piece.
    Now, a last word on the title. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it: "Thus: so. Used in written texts to indicate that a surprising or paradoxical word or fact is not a mistake and is to be read as it stands."