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Ready for something new? Enjoy playing with aluminum foil? Then this show is for you—and many others in its world tour. Having originated in Israel, it now combines dance, puppetry, and metallic wonders with audience participation in the new Knight Theater adjacent to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte.
Prior to the show, the audience sees aluminum pillows, machines, and curled tubes framing the flat aluminum curtain. Dancers enter the aisles to enhance the preshow announcement with gestures. And then the curtain is sucked up by a duct, in the first of many delightful surprises.
Duct worms on the stage floor come alive like Slinkies. Two large worms connect and produce a cute baby, which climbs along several square frames on wheels that move together and apart. Such scenes mix muppet-like playfulness with Freudian dreams.
Materials also make contact with the audience. Ducts expand with air and extend over spectators' heads. Pillows float on their hands as well. Aluminum strips and sheets shoot above them and fall onto them. Tubes roll over them, too.
Headless, humanoid, ductwork creatures dance with extended chimp-like arms. Dancers also create a giant pillow-man puppet that walks into and bows over the audience. They even make a mock fashion show with fanciful aluminum wear.
Throughout this 80 minute presentation, the six dancers and their two assistants continually amaze via the show's startling props and colorful lights. Whether inside aluminum ducts, behind rod and magnetic puppets, or extending beyond them from stage to auditorium, the performers become more and more playful with their metallic friends. In a futuristic style, they speak a universal language of youth glee, which shines beyond the troubled heritage of the Holy Land and its current contentious cultures.
Or, as my teenage son, Peter, put it, as he came home with an aluminum cape: "It was surprisingly entertaining." Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC-Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain and Theatres of Human Sacrifice. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
This show uses words submitted to a website about a key physical experience in our lives. Four performers embody the many voices and memories, with precise transformations, sardonic reactions, and collective echoes. The audience also participates through surveys prior to the show, which are used by the actors and apparently affect the data projected on a screen over their heads.
With no other scenery and with minimal props and costume changes, all of the actors (Ryan Stamey, Shon Wilson, Biniam Tekola, and Carrie Cranford) give tour-de-force performances. Director Chip Decker and lighting designer Hallie Gray create various spaces onstage—with actors speaking directly to the audience from stools, or standing to give their characters more physicality, or interacting in brief scenes. Parts of the play become funny, poignant, and unsettling. It lasts just 90 minutes, with no intermission, but progresses through many lives and their intimate stories, focusing on who, where, and what that first time meant. It touches on multiple mysteries, in joy and pain, light and darkness, from naïve fears, insecurities, and identity-shaping desires to long-term romance or date-rape trauma. It also shows that live theatre can emerge from interactive, social media—and very personal memories, evoking many more in the present audience.
Whether a good or bad experience, our first time was a crucial moment of connection with another human being. (Or, if in the future, it bears even more mystery.) Pondering that again, together, is another way to relive it, not just with nostalgia or resentment, but with a new awareness of each time as a first. Review by Mark Pizzato
Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre at UNC-Charlotte and author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain and Theatres of Human Sacrifice. His plays have been published by Aran Press and his screenplays, produced as short films, have won New York Film Festival and Minnesota Community Television awards.
When you see a Davidson Community Players production you have the feeling that this is a community theatre that represents the best of that type of theatre experience. So when these folks come down from Davidson to Charlotte the expectations are high. The shows are well-produced, directed and acted. In this case, Almost, Maine is pleasant, quaint, and light material.
Director Melissa Ohlman-Roberge does an excellent job with her cast making the most of essentially ten separate playlets or vignettes because not all are created equal. In fact, Mr. Cariani’s play about an area that is “almost” a town in rural Maine has enough quirkiness, sweetness, whimsy, and eccentricity to bring the audience to the brink of enough is enough. What makes the show work are the performers who give it their all inhabiting and bringing some life to the sketchy characters as best they can.
It is Friday night in the depths of the ususal brutal winter in the town of Almost. Various people are out and about. A young couple, Ginette (Kathryn Jeffords) and Pete (Isaac Josephthal) are negotiating their first serious romance. Next, in Her Heart, we meet Glory (Heather Love) who parks herself on East’s (Christian Love) lawn to watch the Northern Lights while carrying pieces of her broken heart in a paper bag. Sad and Glad is about love lost, a misspelled tattoo, and love found. This Hurts, about a man who can’t feel pain, is one of the less effective vignettes. (Actors being hit in the head with an ironing board is a bit discomforting.) Getting it Back is a clever ditty about measuring the love you give versus the love you get.
Act II brings They Fell which deals with love of a different kind. Best friends Chad (Christian Love) and Randy (Scot Slusarick) complain about striking out with the ladies. Story of Hope goes on too long for a payoff that isn’t satisfying. Where it Went, though the most poignant of the pieces is my favorite in the show where the actors (Larry L. Ligo and Ginny Darcy) actually elevate the material. Seeing the Thing is fun and probably has the most consistent laughs in the show. The epilogue is full circle back to Ginette and Pete again.
The cast works well together (they have to, there is plenty of kissing and hugging) and is fine across the board: Ginny Darcey, Kathryn Jeffords, Isaac Josephthal, Larry L. Ligo, Christian Love, Heather Love, Scot Slusarick, and Juli VonCanon.
Love is a magical, mysterious force. It can strike anywhere, any time. If you can put aside logic, or worse, cynicism and roll with the quirks, you will find Almost, Maine an engaging place to visit on a cold winter’s evening. Review by Ann Marie Oliva
Ann Marie Oliva is a local playwright and freelance writer. She is the producer/editor of ARTS à la Mode and a judge for the National Youth Theatre Awards. Ann Marie is a member of the Dramatists Guild.