Waiting At The Alchemist

99% of life is the fine printall those little details. (This past evening, I was waiting fro my wife to get back from acupuncture and my baby daughter had scraped her chin--she caused herself real pain for one of the first times ever. She cried so much and why is it that the little plush wee ninja is so much better at making her happy than I am? And precisely how am I going to tackle things tomorrow? And what about this script that I sent to Pink Banana. Is it really any good?) And so on . . . and somewhere along the line, everything cleared because I saw this show. The latest from Fools For Tragedy is there to remind you--Everything is fine. Relax: There are deeper mysteries. Don’t forget to breathe.

Like all of the best art, Jordan Gwiazdowski’s Waiting is one of those works that suddenly causes you to forget about all that trivial stuffit’s that little arrow on the map of everything that says, “you are here,” with a little footnote in parentheses that says, “(what are you going to do about it?)” Gwiazdowski eaves ogether a fiercely clever script that raises more questions than it could ever answer. The audience sits on the stage while the actors play actors trying to figure out who they are. It is a tremendous amount of existential work that is a great deal of fun to watch. If the Large Hadron Collidor near Geneva worked in metaphors that looked like a kalidoscope, it might behave exactly like Gwiazdowski’s Waiting. Identity is thrown at identity and shot through some weird metaphysical cannon at the substance of circumstance. On the surface it’s a love story, but beneath that it’s also something much, much deeper.

Fools For Tragedy’s Waiting runs through February 18^th at the Alchemist Theatre. For ticket reservations, visit the Alchemist Online. The show then moves to the Villa Terrace February 24^th – 26^th.

A far more coherent review of the show runs in the next Shepherd-Express.

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