The author has a way with a pen, and likes to show it off, more through literary than dramatic skills. Thus, the three hour play was too long by a third, and introduced a melange of 32 characters, most of them circumambulating around the drama, played by eight actors impressive for their multiplicity of talents.
Christopher Hurt, a perky actor with a lovely voice, playing six different roles (virtuosically imbued with different physicalities and accents), eventually seized the play away from the lead character, Lynn, to become the most interesting, sympathetic, and likable of the players.
Jerry Mettner was fine as Lynn's plain jane husband gracefully spanning the decades. His observation that their marriage lacked the "spiritual dimensions of a relationship" put its finger on a central problem of the play.
Joel Goldes inhabited a loony bin of characters, defining each with skill and humor. Intellectually challenged, or simply bewitched by beauty, at one point he touchingly waved farewell to life as it passed him by.
Geneva Carr as the victim not just of a rapist, but of an inept psychiatrist dredging up prenatal lives, and later as a brassy hooker, amused the audience while proving her mastery over impossible high heels.
Two older actors wallowed in their eccentric characters revealing glints of considerable talent. Thus, Jerry Mayer, who can make an adventure out of eating a banana, best captured the required whimsy of the piece. Annette Hunt, sometimes too strident for the small theatre, as when she whinnied like a clothes horse, nevertheless revealed a wealth of unexpected facets of characters her age.
The director helped the actors infuse passion into the dryer speeches, choreographed interesting scene changes, created pleasing pictures on the stage, and drew on music, dance, and set design to maximize the pleasure.
Carol Lane contributed a colorful variety of costumes. (Curiously, the Cyrillic letters on the T-shirt she gave to Connie Winston's elegantly portrayed anarchist left out the "e" in the Russian word for "fortress.")
Bryon Winn did a good a job with the cartoon-like set, lighting, and sound design. His circular sun/moon cut-out was sometimes eerie, and sometimes cheerful. But when the excellent sound system played popular songs between acts, some lyrics from one song ("I'm in love with your ghost") evoked the sense of mystery and depth the play sorely needed.
Copyright 1999 Marshall Yaeger