EARTH AND SKY
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Potentially heavy stuff for a whodunit. But Post, a Chicagoan who enjoyed commercial success with this play last year in New York, has a sense of balance and grace, and he knows how far to take his philosophical conceits before they start to seem, well, conceited. Earth and Sky is a very effective entertainment that cleverly melds its higher and lower aims: evoking the underworld journeys of Raymond Chandler’s novels on one hand and the endangered-but-plucky-heroine melodramas of Daphne du Maurier on the other, it offers suspense during the performance and a gently haunting emotional resonance afterward.
As the title suggests, the play is concerned with dichotomies: male/female, reality/illusion, innocence/corruption, materialism/idealism, past/future. This last theme dictates the structure of the play’s narrative, which starts with a single event and then proceeds alternately forward and back in time: every scene that carries the plot ahead is followed by a flashback that provides a teasing hint of the tragedy to come.
