Father, Daughter Complexity with Constructivists’ ‘I’m Gonna Pray’

×

Expand

Photo by Testaduro Media, LLC

The Constructivists 'I'm Gonna Pray So Hard For You'

James Pickering and Rebekah Farr in The Constructivists' 'I'm Gonna Pray So Hard For You'

The Constructivists present a two-person, two-scene drama of labyrinthine emotional depth this month with Halley Feiffer’s I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard. Milwaukee theater veteran James Pickering is irresistibly abrasive as a gruff New York playwright. As the drama opens, Rebekah Farr sits across from Pickering in the role of the playwright’s daughter. The playwright’s daughter is an actress in a Chekhov show on Broadway. She’s about to find out how her performance has been received critically. 

Father and daughter are smoking. They’re drinking. He’s talking. She’s listening. It’s clear that she loves his stories. It’s clear that he loves telling stories. In the course of a lengthy conversation, they reveal a lot about themselves. There’s tension and aggression between father and daughter. Things get tense. The second scene picks-up five years later. There’s a drastic change from the first scene to the second. Farr and Pickering both manage shockingly different portrayals that speak to an impressive connection between actor and character. Things have drastically changed. Negative cycles of toxic relations echo through the generations. 

Director Jaimelyn Gray has fostered the right conditions for a drama of impressive subtlety. Feiffer presents as much information in what isn’t said as she presents in the actual dialogue. A tremendous amount of insight into both characters quickly shoots by in a constellation of quick glances and subtle turns of phrase. Any ensemble would have a tendency to want to over-render the significance of tiny phrases with ugly emphases that would crush the finer points of the drama’s exquisitely passive-aggressive brutality. Pickering and Farr maintain a brilliantly textured performance from beginning to end. 

The Constructivists’ production of I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard continues through April 29 at the Interchange Theater Co-Operative, 628 N. 10th St. For ticket reservations, visit theconstructivists.org.