October 2019
Jack Thorne is a pretty good storyteller; and more than that, he’s
pretty good at keeping a story moving forward, letting relationships and
characterization emerge via action. Which is why his latest, Sunday,
at the Atlantic, is such a
curiosity. It's a "gathering" play without much story at all, whose main
characters are a group of young NYC people in their twenties and early thirties,
their declared reason for getting together at the apartment of Marie (Sadie Scott) being as members of a book
discussion group; but of course the books in question trigger other more
existential discussions. Marie is kind of lost and lonely, but too defended to
show it; and a lot more resentful of her sometime lover's (Juliana Canfield) boorish fiancé Milo (Zane Pais) than she's willing to let on. (For some of these
characters, bisexuality seems to be a matter-of-fact existence.) There’s shy, literally bookish Keith (Christian Strange), and surly
intellectual Alice (Ruby Frankel),
who is also, for some reason, the play's step-out-of-the-action
omniscient narrator. And there's downstairs neighbor Bill (Maurice Jones), who, when the others
are not there, functions as a present-day reimagining of the Gentleman Caller.
With some equally curious dance
punctuating the proceedings (devised by director-choreographer Lee Sunday Evans), that is sometimes
real and in the moment cutting loose, and sometimes a kind of abstracted commentary,
Sunday is a portrait of today's
disaffected youth that seems…rather like a portrait of yesterday's disaffected
youth. It has some contemporary indicia, but it seems a little quaint, and its
thematic theme murky. All done well enough to be a pleasant enough sit-through;
but seeming like the work of a very much younger and more callow writer than
Thorne is.
As I say, curious…
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