title

title
Photo by Don Kellogg

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Desperate Writers

A wholesale waste of time at the Union Square Theatre.  The house was virtually empty.  I knew this wasn't going to be a good sign.  It only got worse from there.

Written as a complete farce, it pits two desperate writers against three alleged "power-producers" in Hollywood.  Throw in some over-the-top, completely unnecessary characters on top of the bad writing and flat out dumb plot and you've got the formula for the complete mess that wasted about 90 minutes of an otherwise decent Saturday afternoon.    I've seen farce before, and for it to work, it has to be funny.  This was just crap.   Two otherwise normal writers are so desperate to sell a script that they kidnap some producers, lock them in a cage and force them to listen to their script.  On top of the already farcical plot - the script that they are trying to sell pure garbage too.  It was like double torture listening to them read the script of a bad play IN a bad play!

The actors all came with game faces on - full of energy and some even with some good comedic delivery Jim Stanek (David) was a stand-out.  But in the end the material was just so plain old dumb nothing could save it.  Think tiny bucket on the deck of the Titanic.  Wasted effort.   But my congrats to some of the fine character acting on stage.

Upon closer examination of the program at home, I realized that one of the writers of the play itself, Catherine Schreiber, was actually also one of the main characters performing too - one of the producer characters!  Now isn't that the pot playing the kettle?!  While I admire the effort of all the writers and actors involved (none of this is easy by any stretch of the imagination), I really don't even think this material was of the caliber of something like Saturday Night Live - where this farcical stuff is most at home.

Disappointed to say the least.  At least I got some delicious strawberries at the Farmer's Market in Union Square on the way home.  Barely a consolation.