MadLab’s season continues with another world premiere, Patrick McLaughlin’s Until He Wasn’t which opened last night in a production tautly directed by Audrey Rush with assistance from Sheree Evans. A sexually charged thriller, in many ways McLaughlin’s play harkens back to the cynical, nihilistic vibe MadLab made its bones with here in Columbus years ago. A collection of powerful scenes that never quite coheres, Until He Wasn’t is a mixed bag.
I’m going to try to reveal as little about the plot as I can get away with here because the surprise element of the plot twists may not be vital to enjoyment but feels like a big part of what the playwright and director intended. That being said, if you want to go into Until He Wasn’t completely cold, you may wish to read this review after you’ve seen it.
Until He Wasn’t follows two men, Colin (Rob Philpott) and Gavin (Will Macke) and four women, Raya (Laura Spires), Tenille (Jenn Feather Youngblood), Natalie (Kasey Meininger), and Victoria (Sheree Evans) as they try to puzzle out a series of killings. The introductory scenes vibrate with a sharp and real energy, Spires, as Colin’s ex-wife, playing off and coming to terms with Meininger’s Natalie and Mack’s Gavin deals in great, tart volleying, and the flashbacks are handled very well. There’s a brilliant exchange where they agree that Philpot’s Colin was “Smooth because he didn’t try to be.” Rush’s direction and Philpot’s performance peel back the skin to show the mechanics and calculation of a person like that, a great puncturing of the “nice guy” trope.
Most worthwhile horror, especially of the psychological variety, has its root in a deep sadness. That’s where the play excels. Feather Youngblood and Spires’ characters fall into neatly delimited types, the woman ashamed of her scars and living through Meg Ryan movies and the suffering wife watching her world come apart, but they’re heartbreaking. They find the kernel of reality in those characters and dig deep into it until they come out the other side feeling like something we haven’t quite seen before. They don’t have as much to do but Macke’s charmingly narcissistic, confident Gavin and Meininger’s Natalie with a streak of physical comedy, are electric. Philpott makes the most out of the most interesting character in the play, nailing the shifts in mood and ratcheting up and down the intensity.
It might be an unfair criticism to say the mundane scenes have energy and reality the murders don’t. After all, we’ve all picked up and been picked up by someone, none of us have been killed and (thankfully) very few of us have killed someone we were sleeping with. That said, the flashes of clunkiness in the dialogue turn into twitching blobs of cliche in some of those moments. Rush’s direction saves those scenes in many ways. Most interestingly, she choreographs the characters not in the action of the scene to fall simultaneously, yanking the ribbon at corners of the stage taut, looking up at the ceiling, or use the fabric to pantomime whipping something or someone. At the same time, she frames the killings in very sexual positions. This foreground and background contrast, an overlay of eroticism as the killer seems to get no erotic pleasure out of the murders, they’re an eruption of guilt and paranoia, has a friction that sends sparks. That BDSM-recalling ambiguity makes for deliciously uncomfortable, intense scenes.
When Until He Wasn’t clicks, it made the hairs on my arms and neck stand up. In those scenes, the play vibrates with an electricity and a physicality that epitomize why I go to the theatre. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go deep enough into the psychology and spends too much of its two-hour running time on repetition more likely to make the audience go, “Yeah, we got this 20 minutes ago,” than hammer the point home. When the characters become three-dimensional it’s largely through the efforts of the actors and comes in flashes. The plotting consists of a series of leaden “gotcha”s. But there’s a germ of a play at the core that could bring us to the edges of our seats and blow our hair straight back.
Until He Wasn’t runs through October 22 with shows at 8 pm Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, visit madlab.net/until-he-wasnt.