Skip to main content

Curve of Departure  —Studio Theater

In Studio Theatre’s brilliant offering of the season—Curve of Departure —Rachel Bonds  has like a clever spider weaving a perfect web created a play that is complex, fragile and beautiful for its finely threaded connections of human emotions.

There are five characters.

The one character that the play revolves about is never seen.  Cyrus. He is the one for whom there is this family gathering for his funeral, in a motel in  Sante Fe, New Mexico (some know it as “The Land of Enchantment”).  

His father Rudy (Peter Van Wagner) is now in and out of dementia, and on the constant verge of attacks of incontinence.  This grand patriarch wanders between confusion and distraction, bitterness and wisdom.  He  enjoys the silly in life like soap operas while focusing on his end of life decision.  

 Linda (Ora Jones) is the ex-wife. The good woman—she cares for her ex-father-in-law enough to be planning to  give up her day job as what else—a teacher.

Her son Felix(Justin Weaks) arrives with his lover Jackson (Sebastian Arboleda).  The son still angry at his father, wants to cut the funeral events to the minimum to get back to LA.  Jackson is distracted by messages on his phone. 

There is clearly a mystery here, one that causes pain.   Linda had opened the play while ironing Rudy’s pants, and as it follows,  Linda  will find what needs to be to iron out the conflicts of the son she loves and his lover.

 It’s very simple: There are no bad people in the play, but these four characters are dealing with the legacies of bad people who exist in their world outside of this time and place which brings them together. 

How this all works in a brief  85 minutes play  that covers the time span of an evening and an early morning sunrise— is  the beauty of this careful  crafted piece.  Using the shared spaces of a hotel room— beds and bathroom—with outside   hallway for secret phone calls, and  the patio for a group gathering before the funeral—the four characters navigate to have separate snippets of conversation that uncover secrets,  to share experiences, to come to understandings.

No play is expected to conform to equal employment guidelines for its characters.  The diversity of age, race, sex and sexual choices, add to this story that these circumstances are possible across all demographic lines.   There is nothing  so moralistic that turns these outer characteristics  into a sermon. 

Instead the play concentrates on what we know to be the good that is shared as humans, that is,  Linda’s empathy, Felix’s love for Jackson, Jackson’s commitment to family and a walloping dose of Rudy’s wisdom to top it off.  




  



Popular posts from this blog

  Once is here again!   The Brooklyn Gallery Players reach into the treasure chest of great musicals to bring Once alive and on stage in Brooklyn (until to December 17, 2023). Director Mark Gallagher , and Music Directors David Fletcher and Brendon McCray have crafted a vibrant production, seamlessly integrating the 15 member cast in roles  as both actors and musicians. Set in Dublin, the  formula for the poignant love triangle  is simple. Patrick Newhart  plays Guy, an Irish musician who has given up  on love as he sings the award winning classic  Falling.  Newhart mastered the bombastic busking guitar style and performed each of his songs with intensity and passion Sophie Smith-Brody  is Girl,  a Czech woman  who will inspire him to try again both in  love and with music. Smith-Brody performed each of her disparate songs with aplomb,  from the opening classical piece to her plaintive solos – If You Want...
Read more
  Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando — sparkling wit and ageless wisdom —   at   Constellation Theatre — gone but not forgotten In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando A Biography ,  the eponymous hero undergoes many changes over the centuries— from roles in society and relationships to sex change.  Since the time travel gender bending work was published in 1928, this his/her story has continued to undergone adaptions to its original form, from analytical scholarly critiques to crowd pleasing  movies and stage plays.  Constellation Theatre Company continued  the tradition with its amazing presentation of Sarah Ruhl’s narrative play Orlando .    Five actors  take on dozens of roles as characters or in the  chorus to keep the story at its rapid pace,  condensing events spanning almost five centuries into 100 minutes.   Orlando (Mary Myers) is  ever the aristocrat whether as a page in the court of  Queen Elizabeth I (Alan Naylor)...
Read more
From EUGENE ONEGIN  to  DER ROSENKAVALIER  (Or Everything you want to know about love is at the MET OPERA) Great music and great literature meet on a great stage at the Met Opera’s production of Eugene Onegin on the big screen on April 25, 2017.  The words are Pushkin’s from his  Russian novel-poem.  The music is by Tchaikovsky  for what he termed “lyrical scenes.” Tchaikovsky’s music is forever embedded in our consciousness  with his fantasy ballets like  Nutcracker   and Swan Lake .   Pushkin’s work has provided the inspiration for dozens of musical works, including another famous Russian opera, Boris Godunov.     This team of Tchaikovsky and Pushkin is a sure thing but while there are many scholarly interpretations of Pushkin’s work, there is none that so gets it at its core as this opera. Using the very words from Pushkin’s poem,  Tchaikovsky built the opera through a series of powerful co...
Read more