Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Review: FAILURE: A LOVE STORY

By Toby Zinman

For the Inquirer

It's hard to imagine a better production of Philip Dawkins' lovely, bittersweet play, Failure: A Love Story . Directed with great delicacy and imagination by  Allison Heishman for Azuka Theatre, it is a triumph for this superb cast of young actors, some working professionally for the first time.

The plot would be a straightforward one about falling in love if it were told forwardly, but since it's all flashback, and since it takes place in the Twenties, and since it's set in a clock shop, the Fails' family business, it's really about time. And how, when you're remembering, the past seems to be present, just as it does onstage.

The events of the play are both narrated (the story's already over when the play begins and everybody's dead) and enacted (it's happening in the moment before our eyes). So we hear/watch the immigrant parents arrive in Chicago; three daughters are born: the watchmaker Gerty (the luminous Isa St. Clair), the obsessed swimmer Jenny June (Tabitha Allen) and merry Nelly (Mary Beth Shrader) whose "first word was yes, her second 'hooray'." When a baby floats down the river to them, the family is completed by John N (the outstanding Brendon Dalton) who will become a veterinarian and fill the house with creatures.

When Mortimer Mortimer (Kevin Meehan) walks into the clockshop, the love stories begin, as do the tragic events. Eventually, all the clocks run down ("Where did the time go?").  The play moved me In surprising ways and with the smallest of gestures—a knot in the corner of a drape unties and the bird flies out the window.  The simplicity of the performance style—and the unobtrusive skill of the acdtors--relinquishes the theatrical burden of realism, and lets us fill in the space with our imaginations.  It's tempting to mention Beckett and it's tempting to mention Proust, but I won't.

The set, designed by Lindsey Mayer is elegantly austere and the cast is costumed to perfection by Amanda Sharp.

=============================

Azuka Theatre at Off-Broad Street Theater, First Baptist Church,17th & Sansom Sts. Through May 26.  Tickets $18-27. Information: www.azukatheatre.org or (215) 563-1100.