![]() ![]() These subtle revelations ultimately combine to serve as a haunting reminder that when calamity strikes (and it strikes more than once during this play) it is never just an isolated event, but rather part of the larger workings of our world, a world that one day, inevitably, has a calamity in store for each of us too. Watching all of this unfold creates ever widening circles of awareness for the audience as the invisible strings governing the characters' lives become more and more apparent to us. Through short scenes and asides the various subplots of the town's disparate citizens are revealed and begin to slowly intertwine with one another. The play's driving narrative is simple enough: chris (Aaron Orlov) arrives in a small American city to play the role of the Stage Manager in a local production of Our Town, and ultimately meets his future husband (Jeff Dickamore). ![]() What elevates these little individual moments of misunderstanding and chaos into the realm of real tragedy has more to do with composition than with content. Sometimes this uncertainty generates a series of happy accidents that make for a hardy laugh, but far more often it ends in disaster. The characters who inhabit this place are often uncertain, often wrong, often misunderstood. Peña has bulldozed Wilder's Govers Corners and built an entirely different town on top of it. The bulk of this text is fresh and clever, weaving together prosaic asides with crisp and truthful dialogue delivered by characters who typically appear only in brief episodes, but whose subtlety and depth leaves us with the indelible sense of a life fully lived somewhere outside the world of the stage. But, those are the exceptions that make the rule. ![]() And occasionally it feels like Peña is ticking the boxes of hot button issues simply to remind us of the play's social relevance rather than to expressly highlight the experiences of a particular character or to forward the story. the strangers In the first moments of Clarence Brown Theatre's world premiere production of the strangers, the ensemble addresses the audience and explains that the show is a kind of conversation between playwright Christopher Oscar Peña and Thornton Wilder's seminal work Our Town. With the playwright's intentions so thoroughly laid bare it is precariously easy for theatre lovers to spend the evening congratulating themselves for picking out similarities in structure between the two works instead of experiencing the twin beating hearts of Peña's sensitive and sweeping play: a vibrant contemporary portrait of a changing America, and a somber contemplation of our encounters with the mysterious elements that shape human life: happenstance, tragedy, love, and death.Īs with any new work, there are a few moments that ring less true than others, a homeless person who waxes a bit too poetical and transcendental a cadre of teenage soccer players who are little more than straw men for white privilege. Sincere apologies to all the artists involved, to CBT, or anyone else who happened upon those notes and mistook them for a review. Note: Due to a series of unrelated events and user errors an indecipherable assortment of my personal thoughts and notes on this show was was mistakenly published in place of the actual review. ![]()
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