Review
Apparition
Connelly Theatre
December 10, 2005
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
Apparition is an exciting piece of theatre despite it's fragmentary text. At once beguilingly disturbing and chillingly diverting, director Les Waters and his team of expert designers take you to places you may not want to go but can't help but be intrigued to venture. As if we're in REM sleep, images, echoes, characters, and chunks of bizarre narrative slide through your brain like a scythe and, also like a dream, revisit events that confirm one's anxieties. Think actor's nightmare when the story of the Scottish play is enacted by troubling interpreters and an extra witch appears before you make your entrance. Other archetypal fears surface as well - being stalked, meeting human monsters, being lost in an unfamiliar terrain.
The quintet of actors know just how to get under your skin and into your psyche and must be applauded to boot for knowing how to get around in the dark quickly. The pieces of costumes that Christal Weatherly puts together create a charming timelessness - a technique that often fails. Soundscape's Darron L. West doesn't resort to the usual heartbeat pulse to get one's blood going but has other nasty tricks up his sleeve. Andromache Chalfant's set is a conglomeration of areas that work individually or as a whole, the first image being the neon blood red exit sign. If there is a star in this team it is Jane Cox. Her lighting paints images of beauty, fright, trepidation and horror in slow masterly strokes.
Mr. Waters should be highly commended for finding his way through the shards of Anne Washburn's work, the subtitle of which is An Uneasy Play of the Underknown. Not easy it is, and there's a stretch or two that could be eliminated or shortened, but the director explores the underknown with a knowledge of how theatre works to its best advantage.
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