photo by courtesy of AllianceRep.org
Still Life Poster
...........................................................................................

Photographers work in the world of positive and negative space. They see what we have seen, but not registered as important, until they set it apart for us to really consider. This is the essential and existential starting point for Alexander Dinelaris’ play, “Still Life,” being produced by the Alliance Repertory Theatre Company.

Alliance Repertory’s mission is to bring to light unusual, thought-provoking plays. My partner and I went to see “Boom,” literally about the end of the World, and came away enlightened. This play, about endings and beginnings of a more personal nature, is enlightening as well.

The Studio Theatre is a small black box at the Union County Performing Arts Center, at Rahway, and is a truly intimate space. Being so close to the players makes the performance so much more immediate. When the light comes up on a sparsely furnished stage, Joanne (Cody Dalton) stands at a microphone and first introduces us to Carrie Ann(Elissa Strell). The introduction is an encomium more fulsome than the experience of the Artist as a Young Woman herself, since Carrie Ann is obviously uncomfortable with speaking about her work and doesn’t seem oriented to her nominal audience, a school assembly. She drops the “F” bomb several times. Throughout the play, in fact, the word “fuck” is used seemingly for shock value rather than to advance the experience of the characters or the audience and Carrie Ann is first out of the gate with it. More on that in a bit.

Dinelaris is a celebrated playwright, who has a very different way of showing us what lies above, below, and within our perception. He’s got two sides of a coin with his main protagonists–Jeff and Carrie Ann. Jeff (Matt McCarthy) is a trend analyst, who helps people selling goods and services chart where to position their wares in the market. He is soon to discover that his personal future is limited. Carrie Ann is a gifted photographer, who has permitted her father’s death to limit her future, on the brink of a new chapter of creativity. Worlds are soon to collide.

Terry (Mike Babb) is Jeff’s boss and a singularly unlikeable character. His speech is land-mined with frat-boy speech about male and female anatomy, and he’s continually measuring people by relative success. His arrested development doesn’t make him blind to the talents of the people around him, but he is running from himself into the throes of meaningless sex, cocaine and alcohol. Jeff is one of his friends, but women find Terry difficult to take.

Sean (Chess Lankford) is someone who has known Jeff since they were boys, and is the other side of the coin to Terry’s overgrown, puerile lost boy. Sean is also a doctor. When Jeff begins to feel unwell, he turns to his friend, who offers to look into the causes. Suddenly, Sean and Jeff are facing some very serious facts about Jeff’s continued existence.

Carrie Ann is an artist suffering through a crisis precipitated by the death of her father, Theo (Howard Fischer). He is a photographer as well, and she has revered him and wanted to be just like him since childhood. She has now become his caretaker in the last days of his life. His illness has made him cruel and forgetful, as we see in a series of flashbacks. At one point, he admires one of Carrie Ann’s photographs, which is on a food tray she brings him. She is getting praise from her idol, until he pronounces he remembers when “he” took her photograph, and she is disappointed and hurt. Her intellect knows one thing, her emotions feel something else entirely. A series of photos, which she takes during the last days of his life, are the last photos she has taken to date, a series designed around the dignity of death. It is this exhibit that brings Jeff and Carrie Ann to the brink of eternity together.

Katie Hayes and Kelly Maizenaski each play multiple roles throughout the play. This is a tremendous opportunity for an actor to show her chops, but each has special moments where she shines. It is in Hayes’ role as Sean’s wife Mary that she really gets to show her stuff–in a conversation where she and Sean are entertaining Carrie Ann and Jeff, there is a rhythm to the scene that makes it special. We’re not watching a play, we’re watching relationships develop–both the new couple, and the nascent couples’ relationship forming between the two couples—delightful! Maizenaski’s role as the budding photography genius and protégée, Jessie, enables her to gush like the teenager Jessie is and yet become the second act’s increasingly experienced young woman, who will be Carrie Ann’s collaborator and colleague. Both also have difficult roles to play–Hayes as Michaelin and Maizenaski’s as Sandra, and each of these woman are two halves of a coin as well.

The question comes back again and again, what is it we choose to include and what to leave out–how do we share what we see, and what do we find important? Sometimes it’s black and white, in motion. At its essential, it’s ‘Still Life.’

Mike Driscoll’s direction doesn’t flinch from the human reality of the situation. Driscoll has chosen his characters well and limned sharply their lines of engagement. It is reach-into-your-guts real and all the more immediate for being so close to the beating heart of the action. Dinelaris’ play, however, could be tighter and more succinct in what it has to say. If this were a movie, some of the scenes included seem meant to get a more gritty rating, as they do not advance character or plot, but seem only meant to jar the psyche.

From beginning to end, the same gallery show that reflects Carrie Ann’s fear of tomorrow shocks Jeff into the realization that being in the moment may be all we have. Where the eye is guided provides perspective and you need to see this play. Union County PAC is only a four or five block walk from the Rahway train station and well worth the trip. Turn a trained eye on your surroundings–is yours a still life?

Alliance Repertory presents “Still Life” at Union County PAC’s Studio Theatre on Friday and Saturday, January 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. with a talk-back and reception after the Friday performance, and Friday and Saturday, January 28 and 29 at 8 p.m. Visit AllianceRep.org for tickets and additional information.