Review
A Body of Water
Primary Stages (59 E 59 Street Theaters)
October 11, 2008
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
As I exited the theatre where Lee Blessing's A Body of Water is playing, an audience member rather loudly proclaimed "I know a stinker when I see one." I have to say I was in total agreement with him since I too had to suffer the pretensions of this extremely labored piece. Frankly, if I, like the two main characters, Moss (Michael Cristofer) and Avis (Christine Lahti), woke up naked with a stranger in a strange place I might chalk it up to one too many Margaritas, but if I also like them had no idea who I was, I'd be quite a bit more panicked than they appear to be. Simply questioning it like addled philosophers pondering an ethics issue doesn't feel like the right response. Not until a third character, Wren (Laura Odeh), arrives do they get a little angry and heatedly perplexed. But even then that's because Wren plays them off each other with sadistic games. She is their nurse … no wait, their attorney for an alleged infanticide…. Oops, no, no … she's their daughter… or perhaps their daughter and attorney or maybe a think-tank intelligence agent. In any event, Wren is pretty much put out with this duo, as was I, but I was even more so with Wren for jerking everyone around, especially those of us in the audience.
Mr. Blessing seems to have no idea what he wants to do with the trap he's constructed, nor with the characters he's placed in it. More or less, it feels like anything that comes to his wandering mind. Therefore on Neil Patel's characterless silk-screened set, the actors cannot make particularly enlightened choices. Ms. Odeh's voice becomes strident with exasperation early on and stays there, while Mr. Cristofer is all fluttery tics and phoniness apparently impressed by his own performance. Only Ms. Lahti takes the situation at face value and is able to wring honest emotions out of it and bring to it a moving grace under pressure.
Ostensibly the play is about memory - what is remembered, how it's remembered and how memories change, disappear and are manipulated - which has been addressed frequently in dramatic literature. If you wish to read or see a more meaningful exploration of this theme I suggest Harold Pinter's Old Times. My feeling here is that the producers wanted to maintain their relationship with a writer who has demonstrated much better work in the past, but they really should examine what they've accepted before giving the go-ahead.
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