Photo from Splinter Group, Facebook
This month Splinter Group presents a new play by Producing Artistic Director Jim Farrell. A Kiss for the Prize Tomato is a strangely beautiful story of remarkable thematic balance. The balance between innocence and corruption mirrors the balance between simplicity and complexity and many other dichotomies. The pacing of the story seems agonizingly slow in places, which is perfectly fine as it serves to increase the intensity of the anticipation of the unavoidable.
Megan Kaminsky is irresistibly powerful as Emmy, a developmentally challenged young woman awaiting the return of her beloved brother Stick (Claudio Parrone Jr.). In the time since he’s left the family farm, he’s started to emerge as a major rock star, which has given him some distance from his roots in rural upstate New York. Stick’s apparent reluctance to return home may have something to do with a strained relationship with his parents (Libby Amato and Max Williamson who are more than up to the task of playing characters considerably older than they are.) When Stick finally arrives, Emmy is quite upset that he has come with a girlfriend (an endearingly erratic Emily Vitrano.)
Though this is an ensemble drama, Farrell’s script focuses closely on the struggles of Emmy. Farrell's rendering of Emmy is starkly poetic. There is a brutally passionate childishness in the way she expresses herself. Kaminsky has a brilliantly sophisticated handle on the dialogue. She is frantic and excitable in the role without ever crossing the line into undue exaggeration. The rest of the cast supports her considerably, giving Kaminsky a rich emotional landscape to inhabit.
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Through Dec. 13 at the Marian Center, 3211 S. Lake Drive. For more information, visit splinter-group.org.
