Cabin Mystery

Windfall Theatre continued its 16th season last week with a new play by Thomas Rosenthal, titled When I Give My Heart.

Stacey Meyer and Robert W.C. Kennedy play police detectives investigating the death of a college girl. They soon question Jason, a high-school student who claims to have seen the deceased right around the time of her disappearance.

Jason, played by Wauwatosa East High School junior Ryan Stajmiger, tells the officers about running into the girl at an abandoned cabin he often visits. The play drifts into Jason's account of meeting the girl, a drama student named Alana (portrayed with sparkling emotional clarity by Libby Amato). After a shaky start, Alana and Jason hit it off and begin getting to know each other.

The action of the play moves back and forth between the police interrogation room and the cabin. We slowly start to receive a simplified picture of complex characters. Motive, emotion and psychological history come together in a harmless, easy-to-swallow package that feels almost like a betrayal of the emotional complexity of the characters. This is not to say that Rosenthal's skill in crafting a story was anything less than accomplished: The emotions expressed in the dialogue feel very real even when the story doesn't seem to effectively represent the motive behind those emotions.

The chemistry between Amato and Stajmiger serves the center of the play quite well. Ben George effectively adds depth in his intermittent appearances as Alana's father, and Kennedy and Meyer do an excellent job of depicting the intensity of a police interrogation. Even when the script isn't as strong as it could be, the cast makes this a show worth seeing.

Windfall Theatre's When I Give My Heart runs through March 7 at Village Church Arts.