Food for Fish feels like the one that got away
July 9, 2009 at 2:58 pm by Curt Holman in theater
MAN O' WAR: Kelly Criss (left) and Sarah Falkenburg Wallace
When a theater stages a script as stylized as Adam Szymkowicz’s comedy Food for Fish, the artists can approach the mannered dialogue and oddball characterizations in two ways: They can play the unusual material as completely natural, or they can tune into a quirky wavelength so funny or revelatory the audience doesn’t mind that it’s unnatural. For its summer repertory festival of new plays, Essential Theatre finds the right balance for Food for Fish’s final half-hour or so. Otherwise, Food for Fish unfolds like a drawn-out sketch for most of its running time.
Tortured young writer Bobbie (Brent Nicholas Rose) narrates the show as he pounds away on his manual typewriter and, in his spare time, kisses unaccompanied women on the streets of New York. (The playwright sees Bobbie more as a Cupid than a sexual predator.) Bobbie writes about three sisters — married agoraphobe Barbara (Charles Swint), systematic scientist Alice (Eve Krueger), and impulsive freelance journalist Sylvia (Kate Graham). Their father, a gravedigger, died a year earlier, and in one of the play’s broad running jokes, the sisters keep his coffin in the living room: “We should bury him. The neighbors are beginning to complain about the smell.” The coffin provides such an obvious symbol about clinging to emotional baggage, it’s as if the playwright wants the obviousness to be part of the joke.
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(Photo by Brenda Messick)
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