WHITE DWARF
My counterargument was that there were some questions (How do we live now? When did this particular character’s life go astray?) that the arts are better suited to answer. I never persuaded him. And he never converted me.
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Certainly this is true of Regal’s ambitious but fatally flawed work. In attempting to deal with a cloud of questions about life and death–among them, “Why do we grow old?” “What is the point of living?” “Why me, why now?”–Regal has created a play that is decidedly long on talk and short on story and character development.
These three stories might make more sense if Regal had spent more time trimming and rewriting his script. Instead, it takes a very long time to figure out what these seemingly unrelated stories have in common.
Director Audry DeLucia’s cast for Alan Arrivee’s bleak and remarkably unfunny one-act Dream Horse may take similar comfort. The worst actor in Chicago couldn’t make it any more tedious.
It’s sad that director Audry DeLucia and her young, energetic, talented cast seem primed for much better material than this. Dan Harray knows how to get a laugh with the simplest roll of his eyes. And Jennifer Roberts’s remarkably subtle seduction of the old man (accomplished with little more than eye contact and understated body language) adds the only moment of drama to an otherwise flat work. In fact, only Arrivee’s utterly unconvincing old man seems at home in this dead material.
