On the Verge -- Great Actors, Uneven Production
New Rep’s production of On the Verge is usual and
avant-garde. It contains some sparkling, witty moments, and several neat performance elements, and some laugh-out-loud funny lines. Unfortunately, much of the
good work of the performers and production staff is undermined by the fact that
it’s just not a very good play. On the whole, the production ends up feeling lacking in cohesion and overly long.
We were interested in the idea for this show because
of a fascination with intrepid Victorian lady travelers. They were remarkable
women who somehow escaped the extreme strictures that society placed on them.
They didn’t just escape from the suburbs to a condo downtown; they fled to the
Congo, to Morocco, to live with Bedouins in the desert or with Buddhist monks
in the Himalayas. (Apparently their
money bought some protection and European dress and manners made them seem so
exotic as to be untouchable.) They may have been naïve, but they had real
intellectual curiosity. And they were not silly people.
The play, to its credit, does capture a
sense of wild eccentricity and exuberance. But there’s not really a plot to
speak of, except for somewhat erratic and unexplained time travel, which ends,
for no real reason, in 1955. And the
direction doesn’t help. The three women are quite different in character. One
is a scientist, one a poet and dreamer, and the third a rather conventional
soul on journalistic assignment from a tabloid. But these differences in
character are blurred by similarity of dress and manner so that the women seem
much the same (and thus, not as interesting as they should be) until late in
the second act.
Of the four actors – all of them
familiar to New Rep patrons and Boston audiences in general as superb performers
– only Benjamin Evett escapes being bogged down in the sometimes-ponderous wordplay
which plagues the three women. The pace picks up whenever he enters, whether as
a cannibal who becomes the person he eats, a yeti, a bebop gas station
attendant, a lounge singer, one woman’s left-behind husband (or his ghost) or a
nebulous character called Mr. Coffee by a confused traveler.
As the women travel, seemingly via some
sort of transparent Mary Poppins-like parasol, they develop the ability to see
into the future. Much of the comedy revolves around words and phrases which pop
into their consciousness, words that are part of our everyday vocabulary but
which would mean nothing to a Victorian – air mail, rock and roll, Mr. Coffee,
Burma-Shave, casino. Most of the “osmosing” of the future, however, is light
and funny. We were confused and rather
disturbed by the absence of any sense of the darkness in the times ahead of
these women. Mustard gas is mentioned in passing, but any Cassandra peering
into the twentieth century would have to have to spend some effort to avoid
seeing the sickening destruction of World War I and the even worse events of
the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
Sad to say this production was just not
up to New Rep’s admirable high standard. The play, sets and costumes and
direction all seemed curiously intellectually sloppy. I particularly wish
Christine Hamel, Adrianne Krstansky and Paula Langton better luck in future New
Rep productions. They are all fine actors and did their best with a difficult
and sometimes-dragging text.
~ Johanna Ettin & Shauna Shames, New Rep Reviewers
