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Review A Small,
Melodramatic Story
The Public Theatre
November 4, 2006
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
A Small, Melodramatic Story by Stephen Belber feels like an
episode from something like "The Wire" or to a lesser degree, "Law and Order" (a
show for which Mr. Belber has written). Social Worker with baggage falls for cop
with baggage but for sanity's sake switches her affections to civil service
archivist who is deeply in love with her. The small story is not so much
melodramatic but more personal history play, the main character, "O", addressing
the audience as though all that is transpiring before us is in the recent past.
The melodrama comes in her hyperbolic lyrical assessment of her situation.
The story is relatively simple at first. O lost her husband six years ago to an
incident that is later blamed on the First Gulf War's dispensing of medicinal
deterrents. The husband's close friend, Keith, combs through information files
for the government documenting and cataloguing stories pertinent to any
situation concerning the government. Keith carries a torch for O but unwittingly
introduces her to a D.C. cop, Perry, whom O starts dating. Keith, knowing O's
ethical and moralistic integrity, innocently or not, finds information on Perry
concerning a fatal shooting in which racial bias plays a heavy hand and he
reveals it to her. Though the event occurred ten years in the past, O does some
digging and finds the now grown-up brother of the victim, who has an
understandably built up anger toward his brother's killer. The play at this
point should be titled "A Small, Convoluted Story" and Mr. Belber begins to
stretch motivational credibility as well as rely on some relatively contrived
machinations. His purposes about race relations and relationships in general are
obscured, and by the end I found myself unmoved by the characters' plights.
The quartet of actors (Carlo Alban, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Lee Sellars, and
Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) are all, in the tradition of the LAByrinth Theatre Company
whose production this is, fine actors who smooth over the uneven terrain of Mr.
Belber's story. Director Lucie Tiberghien has less luck but still manages to
keep us engaged throughout. ...end
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