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    Theatre Review: Short North Stage and Wild Women Writing’s Over the Edge With Beckett and Eno is A Night of Grim, Thoughtful Laughs

    Wild Women Writing and Short North Stage’s co-production, Over the Edge with Beckett and Eno follows on their previous collaboration of short plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter staged in March. Over the Edge is a similar cross-section of exquisite work rarely produced in Columbus or anywhere, pairing a single work by Beckett with four shorts by one of the more exciting young playwrights to emerge in the last 15 years, Will Eno.

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    The evening opens on its heaviest note, with Beckett’s gorgeous “Ohio Impromptu.” Samuel Beckett wrote this for an OSU symposium in his honor in 1981 commemorating his 75th birthday. Two men, in similar long white wigs and beards, sit at two adjoining sides of a table, shielding their eyes from looking at one another. Reader (Richard Green) reads from a giant book while Listener (David Fawcett) knocks the table with his left hand to halt the reader and to trigger repetitions. The melancholic bed time story unfolds of a man trying to get over a great loss by, as people will, ignoring all advice from living and dead. As the fable that may be a history of one or both of them unfolds, and stutters, and elongates at the Listener’s demand, the audience feels time’s elasticity and poison. The sentences alone are cut gems but like in all Beckett, the breath and the silence is the real story. This impromptu, this heavy wisp, grinds to a halt with “Nothing is left to tell,” despite another knock. The only time the two men look each other in the eyes is jaw-dropping.

    Wisely, after the Beckett, the tone goes significantly lighter but never what most people would quite call “light”. The four Will Eno pieces mostly orbit around the difference between our public and private selves and how a desperation to mold the former into a shape we think will be pleasing to a real or imagined “other” melts down the edges of the latter. “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rain” is the funniest and sharpest of the four, two people named only “Gentleman” (John Hawk) and “Lady” (Heather Caldwell) recording video personal ads, losing and finding themselves in rambling attempts to just, hopefully, not make themselves look bad. Hawk plays the man as a twitching bundle of nerves holding in barely sublimated rage. Caldwell plays the woman with a mix of hopefulness and the resignation that comes from that hope not paying off one too many times. They’re both very hard to take your eyes off. In their fumbling attempt not to connect but to prove themselves worthy of connection they circle around the things that have made them alone so far and the confusion that in all this world they haven’t found anybody yet, they’re in an empty room, talking to a camera.

    “The Bully Composition” looks at the public face across the lens of history and the lens of a still camera instead of the video in “The Bully Composition”. It features Susie Gerald as a photographer and Taylor Moss as her assistant addressing a group of people they’re ready to photograph in an homage to an unseen WWI photograph. In its short time, it touches on the difficulty of empathy. How easy it is to think you understand what someone is thinking without really feeling that kind of connection but, at the same time, how uncomfortable attempts at that deeper understanding can be – as in a riveting monologue by Moss and a flinty exchange between the two regarding if it’s possible to be “expressionless” in a photograph. How does the end of the world look in someone’s eyes and how close does media ever come to catching it? This had some of the best acting in an evening where I saw no bad acting.

    The Bully, part of Over the Edge. Composition, by Will Eno. Actors, left to right, Taylor Moss and Susie Gerald. Photo by Allan Burkman.
    The Bully, part of Over the Edge. Composition by Will Eno. Actors, left to right, Taylor Moss and Susie Gerald. Photo by Allan Burkman.

    Human-sized apocalypses keep reappearing in David Fawcett’s Coach in “Behold the Coach, in a Blazer, Uninsured” giving a press conference at the end of a very bad year. A bravura, funny, grim acting job from Fawcett brings home how much a person is judged on their job and how harsh the judgment is when the rest of life – judged as a “distraction” – gets too overwhelming to ignore. The slippage of language here is fascinating, from clichés about a “building year” to the moment we all get to in defense, where there’s no point in lying to ourselves or our interrogator. When he lands on, “You’re not just having a bad day – this is what you look like now,” you feel the axis shift, that through-line of discomfort appears, glowing, and twists.

    I found “Oh, the Humanity” the weakest of the plays that evening, though again the acting from Richard Green, Susie Gerald, and John Hawk, was top-notch. A riff on the artificiality of the theatre and the artifice created in experience and even, as I read it, a look at dementia and who we are when are memories desert us, suffers from feeling like a bookend to the mature mystery of the Beckett dealing with similar themes.

    There’s a gorgeous, on-the-nose earnest moment when John Hawk announces himself as “The beauty of things. The majesty of – I don’t know – the universe?” He warns the other characters and the audience we’re going to laugh but that’s the kind of tightrope walking that’s made Eno such an arresting voice and the kind of balance that even when it doesn’t fully land makes the world look a little different. Katherine Burkman’s direction throughout is perfect and this is the kind of interesting sampler of work I wish more companies in town put on. A risk worth taking for the troupe and the audience.

    Over the Edge has performances at Short North Stage, Saturday May 2, Sunday May 3 and Thursday May 7 through Sunday May 10. Visit ShortNorthStage.org for more information.

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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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