CORNELIUS
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THE BOAT FACTORY
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DIRTY GREAT LOVE STORY
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I’m
embarrassed that time constraints have me writing about Cornelius in brief, but if you’ve seen the
home page for this and the previous edition of the ‘zine, you saw how important
I thought it was that you have a timely heads’ up. A revival of a
“forgotten” play by J.B. Priestley,
it made me happier than anything I saw in the season just past. Basically it
tells the story of a long established business, a metal supplier, that has gone
into a slump from which it will clearly not recover. Holding things together as
the ship goes down is the title character, co-owner of the firm (splendidly
played by Alan Cox), doing all
he can to keep spirits afloat. Not in denial, not a font of hopeless bromides,
but nonetheless a fellow with an indefatigable faith in the ability of the
human sprit to cope. Somehow. The play, set in 1935, during the
British depression, resonates like crazy with the precarious financial and
employment crises besetting the world today, and though it’s a traditionally
well-made affair, it nonetheless has a vibrant life that transcends its
neatness of structure. The rest of the cast is uniformly splendid, and the
perfectly-tuned direction is by Sam Yates.
Dan
Gordon’s The Boat Factory might not be quite as glorious, but it sure comes a close second. A
two-hander, it features Mr. Gordon playing his father (and a few other small
roles), reminiscing opposite Michael Condron (who plays the many
other roles) about his time learning the ship-building trade in the Belfast
ship yards in the 1940s. Something tells you right away that by the end of the
evening, you’ll be moved at the fate of its characters; but nothing prepares
you for how deeply emotional even technical data can be, here. There is so much
passion in the recitation of types of nails and types of saws and their function, that what is also clearly
a grinding and punishing way to make a living also attains a sense of pride and
wonder, even romance, perhaps because with tools so small, a community of men
can build things that are so sleek, huge and majestic. Played on a small stage
equipped with several levels and two climbable scaffolding units, against a
backdrop ground plan of the shipyards, The Boat Factory is one of those rare and special events in which
savvily applied minimalism creates a fully populated world that can rival any
widescreen historical epic. Direction is by Philip Crawford.
Dirty
Great Love Story seems
to me mostly for a younger crowd, though being part of the BoB-fest it certainly
had it’s share of oldies in the audience having fun. Performed by its two
authors, the perhaps-just-barely 30-something Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, it tells the story of a one night stand that has to overcome a two
year aftermath of various absurd relationship-delaying complications before it
can settle into the You’re-the-One romance-for-life it cries out to be. Imagine
the plot of a contemporary-film romcom performed in a black box setting (there
are no props), in which two actors play all the characters; and
in which both dialogue and narration are in rhymed couplets and quatrains. The
rhyming-scanning-cadences package isn’t always particularly neat, taking more
than a few rap-generation liberties in all departments, but if it were of Sondheim
like meticulousness, it would (a) demand music and (b) possibly (in unconscious
symbolism) fight its own relationships-are-messy thesis. I will say it took me
a while to warm to the youthiness and inconsequentiality of the story (far
longer than it took most of the audience, who glommed onto the charm of the
performers immediately, but at the half mark, I was drawn into how
consequential it all seemed to them, and
once you make that pact, you’re
hopelessly theirs. Not essential, but great fun, and directed with ideal
invisibility by Pia Furtado.
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