Sometimes I hear voices
There’s a chance to hear a playwright who knows the power of the spoken word this month. My friend Marc Chun is having his play Match (billed as Heard, Not Scene with another, short play) done at the Red Room downtown. Marc, unlike me, has a real job and spends most of his waking hours pursuing causes having nothing to do with the theater. Yet he makes time to write splendidly crafted pieces that rely entirely on actors and speech for their effect. Match’s structure isn’t quite as original as the buzz suggests: To bring a bunch of seemingly unrelated narratives to a thematic head isn’t unexplored territory – it’s a subgenre, really. Marc passes the benchmark for this type of play by successfully casting a spell, creating an early sense that a revelation is in store and making us desire it through empathically drawn characters.
It’s prime Off-Off Broadway, delivering a bang on a next-to-zip budget, and it’s refreshing to see a production do this with confidence in its resources, i.e. skillful storytelling and a lyrical sensibility. The Miss Saigon helicopter joke on the production postcard is a little bit moot, since gimmicks of that proportion are so obviously beyond the reach of a company performing in the Red Room. But it’s nice to see something in the fringe circuit that isn’t so desperate for attention that it needs a tag like “Imploding psyche of 27-year-old office assistant meets redemption in a burlesque meditation involving ninjas, mushrooms, and Alan Ginsberg.” Handcart groupies (both of you) will be gratified to see alum Steven Gridley directing, alum Erin Treadway performing, and Handcart workhorse James Mack playing frightened confusion in a role he was born for. The play’s at 8 PM Monday and Tuesday (September only), at the Red Room on East 4th.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at September 6, 2002 12:48 PM
Comments
“Match” was great. I got to see its penultimate performance on Monday the 23rd. Good writing and directing set up a handful of talented actors on a sparse stage, and they completely engage the audience. Yum….
Posted by: Kevin Ashworth at September 25, 2002 02:35 PM
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