STRAIGHT ARROWS
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Unfortunately, in her one-woman show Straight Arrows, Dodson the actress has tied her fortunes to Dodson the writer, whose talents are considerably less developed. And so Straight Arrows, which strives to be a complex tapestry of characters and stories, becomes an aimless collection of quick sketches. Dodson does quite well creating instant stage characters merely by changing her posture and facial expression, and by repeating one or two habits of speech, but she is not as good at creating characters who remain interesting the third or fourth time you see them. And after a while Dodson’s actorly tricks become hollow and predictable.
Dodson the actress needs a solid script to provide some compelling reason for her characters to live beyond their initial, admittedly clever, creation–and for the audience to care about who they are and where they’re going. Instead, we are given a seemingly endless series of short scenes–many of them far too short to give us anything but a glimpse of a character–pasted together in a collage that emphasizes the contrast between adjacent scenes and characters but fails to provide a coherent principle for the whole show.
