There's always that vague sense of disorientation when you're entering a play. You're trying to settle yourself into the era of the script and reconcile it with the era of the production and the world going on outside the theatre.
For contemporary audiences, its always really easy to transport themselves into an era of antiquity. It's easy enough to make the jump into ancient Rome or England or whatever. And it's easy enough to watch a show from the mid-twentieth century, but anything that involves technology from the past the years has a tendency to date in kind of weird ways. Computers and information technology have a way of advancing much more quickly than any other major aspect of a plot.
I found myself a bit distracted while watching Pink Banana Theatre's production of Dark Play or Stories for Boys. I felt the need to place it in a much earlier era of the Internet than it was evidently set in. . .
Here's the deal: The central conflict of the play relies pretty heavily on our belief that a character (played by Nate Press) is gullible enough not to suspect a girl that he's corresponding with online is real. He doesn't seem to suspect anything even though she only reluctantly sends him a picture and says that she can't meet with him in real life. He webcams her. She says her stepdad won't let her have a webcam. Okay . . . but as the story progresses, it's REALLY difficult not to think that the character played by Press wouldn't start suspecting that he was being duped by the character being played by Nolan Borne.
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And so a part of me was trying to mentally place the story in a very early era of the internet where the idea of people lying about who they were online might have been a bit less commonly thought about. The script kept popping very contemporary concepts into the dialogue, though . . . granted, commercial webcams were evidently available as far back as the mid-'90s, but was that far enough back to make anyone that gullible? And then there was mention of the September 11th attacks . . .and as much as I tried to place it in the distant past, the script kept asserting that it was set at most ten years ago or so.
So Press' character had to come across as being the kind of gullible that wouldn't have suspected that he was being lied to. . . and a lot of the weight of believability was placed on the shoulders of Press himself, who has a very, very charming way of playing lovably stupid characters. Here he's channeling a lot of whist audiences have been seeing for years in his continuing performances as the dim-witted Frosty the Snowman in Neil Haven's durable comedy Who Killed Santa?
Press even manages to deliver the gullibility with a kind of depth and complexity that makes it seem very nuanced. . . but he can't make that gullibility believable alone and much of the rest of the production seems to be failing to lend him a hand.
One of the few other laments that seems to be working here is Brenna Kempf's performance as the fictitious online woman that Press' character is interacting with. She is so obliteratingly cute and sweet that we as an audience want her to be real as well. The sweetness is even tempered by a casualness that keeps her from seeming artificial, which makes her seem all the more believable. Clearly work has been done on making her seem artificially cute while also seeming earthbound enough to be real. And that goes a long way towards making the premise believable.
And actually, now that I'm writing all his out, it occurs to me that, though there are plenty of reasons to see this show around the edges of the ensemble including fun performances by Kelly Coffey and Tim Palacek, Press and Kempf are more than enough reason to come and see this show. We feel the longing of Press' character for love. And we feel the longing of Kempf's character to be real. It's a really interesting dynamic even if the rest of the production doesn't always work.
Pink Banana Theatre's production of Dark Play or Stories for Boys runs through November 16th at The Arcade Theatre on 161 West Wisconsin Avenue. A comprehensive review of the show runs in the next print edition of The Shepherd Express. For ticket reservations, visit pink banana online.
