Three Dark Stories in Theater Gigante’s Season Finale

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Photo by Mark Frohna

Theatre Gigante Terminus

Theater Gigante closes its season with playwright Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus. Three dark stories intertwine as three actors play three characters onstage. It’s a very minimalist production. Isabelle Kralj shows considerable strength as a woman who is faltering through life. She’s trying to be responsible and working a high-stress job on a crisis line. Tori Watson plays a younger woman who fate has called away from a cozy night at home. She has followed the gravity of causality towards an evening of dinner and questionable judgment. Watson is crushingly vulnerable in the role of someone caught-up in events beyond her control. Don Russell is charmingly dark as someone who is looking for little more than a good time. He finds fun in progressively darker places as the plot progresses. The stories of all three are delicately connected in some fairly brutal and shocking ways. 

Director Michael Stebbins does a good job of focusing in the three narratives in the most simple and stark approach. There is a powerful sense of focus on the narratives, as there is nothing else on stage, but the people speaking. There are no significant effects with lighting or sound, or anything like that. It’s just three fictional people talking through three actors on stage in the most intimate of settings, talking about some of the most intimate things. There is a horror beating through the center of the drama that is the driving pulse behind everything. That horror delves progressively into the strange and supernatural with an earthbound filth that still manages to cast light into the deeper beauty of human existence through heart, passion and poetry. 

Theatre Gigante’s production of Terminus runs through March 7-9 at Kenilworth Studios 508, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For ticket reservations and more, visit Theatre Gigante online.