END OF THE WORLD WITH SYMPOSIUM TO FOLLOW
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The direction, by Elissa Bassler, was ill conceived. Even though the playwright specifies in the script that “there must be no waiting for a set change,” cast members lug chairs, desks, and other paraphernalia on and off the stage throughout the play. The blocking was strained and awkward. Even the props were out of control. In one scene one of the characters ignites the roast chicken he has been preparing. Besides the fact that it’s a silly allusion to a nuclear holocaust, the night I saw the show the actor couldn’t get the fire out and went scurrying out with the flaming dish in his hands. When I finally started breathing again, all I could think about was an escape route from the theater.
Bassler wasn’t the only culprit. The set, by David S.S. Davis, was shabby and rickety. Catherine Young’s lighting, striving for a film noir look, tended to be too noir. (In one scene an actor delivered a monologue with the shadow of a wayward wire falling directly across her face.) And the cast members–many of them obviously inexperienced–looked like they were left by the director to flounder on their own.
In short, End of the World is so lucid, provocative, and illuminating that it survives a production that is flaccid and muddled. The energy of the script allows even this production to gain in power and coherence as it progresses. Bannon becomes more anguished as Trent. In the second act Knight Houghton, who plays Philip Stone as a B-movie villain in the first act, delivers a moving monologue describing an atom-bomb blast he witnessed. (Houghton actually witnessed the first hydrogen-bomb blast in the South Pacific in 1952.) And by the end of the play, Kopit’s forceful voice is coming through clearly.
