DWARFED BY COMPARISON
Curious Theatre Branch
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Trixie and Alice have been scarred by their family in opposite ways. Trixie, who manifests a chronic skin disorder that seems to be eating her alive, is a chain-smoking alcoholic avant-garde theater artist. Alice, who practices her tap routines as though her life depends on it, is constantly cleaning up everyone’s mess. By presenting his play in two distinctly different styles at once, O’Reilly gives Black and Fieber a run for their money. One moment Trixie is huddled nervously in the corner, scratching her infected back against the kitchen wall while shouting invectives at her hated mother; the next she is offering a generous hug to her mother at a funeral. Alice goes from tap-dancing on the kitchen counter to get her family’s attention to sitting quietly in a bar and sharing her feelings with Gus the Waiter (Reinemann).
Both actresses meet the challenge. Their remarkably flexible performances make clear the precise level of reality the play is on from moment to moment, and they imbue their characters with a complexity and humanness that sets them apart from their one-dimensional family.
The presentation of these two worlds is quite straightforward, with the Russian scenes taking place in a conventional playing area in front of the audience, while the American scenes are hidden in small, partially obstructed pockets around the room. The Russian scenes present something of a conventional narrative in a self-consciously Chekhovian style, as everyone waits around for the family estate to be sold. (The characters even seem to be standing in Chekhov’s famous cherry orchard; the stage is full of already-chopped-down trees, braced against the ceiling beams in order to keep them standing. The American scenes are more fluid and ambiguous, a series of evocative non sequiturs–disguised as ordinary conversation–about depression, love, perfection, and sexual frustration.
