SWAY
In the right hands, say Harold Pinter’s or David Mamet’s, this rhetorical device can be quite effective. Anyone who has seen Pinter’s The Birthday Party knows how much unstated but still felt tragedy lies beneath the “comic” dialogue. However, in less certain hands this switching from a comic to a more serious tone seems less a conscious choice than a halfhearted attempt to obscure the inconsistencies of the work. Such is the case, I suspect, with Andy Roski’s Sway, which changes tone every time the scene changes.
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As it stands now, the play seems more like several very different plays pasted together. One’s a sex farce about Pam, Eddie, and Eddie’s brother; one’s a serious, Marsha Normanesque play about a middle-aged daughter and her increasingly senile mother; and one’s about an LA crazy who blames a poor schmuck in Chicago for the death of his wife.
