FATHOM BLAZER
That informality is in stark contrast to Doorika’s space: a beautifully restored industrial loft, utterly regular and geometrical. At one end of the room are placed 40 or so mismatched chairs, all painted pure white, in two neat rows. Visually they’re stunning, as if they had appeared out of a dream–especially since everything else in this vaulted room is lost in the shadows.
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The performance begins when a rather sad-looking man (Will Wright) who has been sitting in the rafters playing music for the audience picks up a microphone and, as if he had nothing better to do, tells a bad joke. Then the performers enter one by one in formal dress, introduce themselves, and share brief anecdotes about their families, spoken colloquially and probably spontaneously. The stories are generally unremarkable, centering around typical childhood anxieties, and create a kind of forced intimacy with the audience.
All of these sections are performed with all-out conviction by the talented cast, which also includes Ethan Smeltzer and Lisa Kathryn Perry. Spooner’s sensibility seems particularly suited to this material: he navigates the sudden shifts and turns with grace, agility, and humor. But I had a difficult time finding an intuitive or intellectual through line to connect these disjointed scenes. This time Doorika’s intentional lack of continuity seemed merely puzzling. And the off-the-cuff opening made the mental gymnastics required to properly read the rest somewhat unexpected. It’s as if the show’s master narrative, the core of ideas and images out of which the piece was generated, has not been brought into clear enough focus.
