Review: Luna Theatre's 'How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
Luna Theatre’s production of Fin Kennedy’s cliche-filled script is bolstered by some good acting, says Toby Zinman, but no matter how hard the actors try, the play remains 100 minutes of repetitious existential blather.
And so my Fringe begins--with a resounding thud. The first show of Luna Theatre's season (and one of the first shows of the Fringe), is Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear and Never Be Found. This 2005 cliché-filled script is bolstered by some good acting, but no matter how hard the actors try, the play remains 100 minutes of repetitious existential blather; the playwright sounds like a graduate student who has read more Beckett than is good for him.
The central character is Charlie (David Stanger) who, at the age of twenty-nine, finds his life is a mess; carrying a vase full of his mother's ashes (couldn't the prop master find a container with a lid?) Charlie faints and finds himself in the Lost Property room of a London tube stop. (Why, it must be a metaphor!). It will turn out he is addicted to cocaine, has embezzled money from his company, owes a friend even more money, drinks to excess, and, a bunch of other predictable life-wreckers.
He looks into a mirror and wonders, "Do you ever feel that everything was fake?" Other inquiries include, "What makes you who you are?" When Charlie protests, "It's boring!" another character replies, "Yeah, welcome to life." This is Kierkegaard for teens, with the Hallmark touch: "It's the little things that count."
Charlie meets an old friend, Mike (Mark Cairns) who advises him how to assume a new identity and start a new life, a kind of bureaucratic version of suicide. These instructions go on and on. Predictably, this will turn out badly, so it's just as well we didn't take notes. The central scene --duelling monologues from Charlie and Mike—has the evening's only real dramatic energy as Stanger roars through a litany of urban miseries: after each item on his disgust and rage list, he tells us what violence he wants to commit, concluding each with, "But you don't."
Three other actors, who remain onstage throughout, play multiple roles: Bethany Ditnes, Steve Wright, and Jennifer MacMillan who contributes some much-needed comic relief with a variety of weirdo characters and accents.
Gregory Scott Campbell's direction emphasizes the non-realistic elements of the play, and creates sets out of slide projections, but these inventions merely strain to generate interest which this play simply doesn't provide.
How to Disappear and Never Be Found. Luna Theatre Co at the Adrienne Playground, 2030 Sansom St. Through Sept. 18. Tickets $20 Information: 215-704-0033 or www.lunatheater.org