REFLECTIONS
For seven months I thought I lived in Uptown. Then one evening about a month ago, I arrived home to find men in a utility truck affixing maroon banners to the streetlights. The banners announced that I was now living in “Buena Park: An Historic District.”
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Kings don’t make it a habit to grace trash heaps, but that hardly matters to Mathilda, and soon the bum awakens and engages the young couple in clever banter about the meaning of their lives. If when two people marry they promise to love and obey, the bum wonders which partner will obey the other. When they talk of the bum’s missing shoes, they end up exploring what denotes civilization. Are shoes and credit cards all that separate the washed from the unwashed?
These symbols and ideas of identity are at the heart of this short play. And supported by an able cast, the exchanges were provocative and lively. But the script was so engaging at earlier points that the ending seemed anticlimactic, predictable.
Questions of personal identity also provide the basis for Hopscotch, the second one-act of the evening. But here the results felt tired and trite. Israel Horowitz’s Hopscotch chronicles the surprise reunion of Elsa and Will ten years after Will abandoned the pregnant teenaged Elsa and fled to a new life.
I already knew that the goal of a game of hopscotch is to reach home. It wasn’t a great leap to figure out what Elsa and Will might be seeking, and this made Mitten’s direction seem slow and unenlightening. With an outcome so predictable, the play called for more imaginative staging to probe the deeper meanings in the dialogue. Even breaking up the hopscotch diagram and distributing its boxes around the stage might have demonstrated the difficulties these characters have in reaching home.
