I should probably stop writing right here because from here on it's going to be a rant!
The Hell with it! Ranting is good for the soul.
Tonight's mayhem was called Peerless, written by Jiehae Park.The play is billed as a comedy. Ms. Park has a weird sense of humor.
The first irritating thing that happened tonight was the pre-curtain music: minimalist crap. Four bars of inane sounds were repeated until I was ready to surrender (see Japanese Water Torture), then another equally meaningless four bars would do the same thing, ad infinitum.
Then two actresses, who were supposed to be twins, began shouting at each other, overstepping each others lines making it very difficult to have any idea what the were arguing about.
The plot, if it can be called that, is that the one twin is trying to get the other into a college where there is only one scholarship left which has been given to a young man who is 1/16th Native American. As the play proceeds, they try various ways to kill him to get him out of the way so the twin can get the scholarship. Learning that he is deathly allergic to nuts, they fool him into eating a cookie that has nuts in it, at which point he appears to drop dead. After much toing and froing, he comes back at the end of the play, not dead but very ill, and blows up the one sister who fed him the nutty cookie.
You can see why this is a comedy.
Much of the overlapping dialogue and ceaseless motion of the actors was really at the level of gimmickry. To cover up then fact that there is not much plot to hang a play on, perhaps??
We sat in the second row. The staging was such, with much of the action taking place with actors sitting on or lying on the floor, that we could not see them over the heads of the first row patrons.
The actors were Sasha Diamond, Ethan Dubin, Ronald Alexander Peet, Laura Sohn, and Adina Verson. I wish them better luck in the next play they are cast in.
