photo courtesy of Alliance Repertory Theatre
Lilli Marques & Gus Ibranyi as Colby & Nick in "Smudge"
...........................................................................................

Michael Driscoll opens Alliance Repertory Theatre’s 14th season with “Smudge” by Rachel Axler. A brilliant play and the title gives nothing away of the graphic-novel oddity of the next 90 minutes of your life. Produced in a new performance space for Alliance, the Wharton Music Center in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, “Smudge” is an excellent choice for a black box theater. That said, the quality of the play, with its sheer absurdity, requires three actors with mad skills to pull it off, all of which this cast has in abundance.
Rachel Axler is someone whose work is familiar to you. She writes for television, for such shows as “Parks and Recreation” and “The Daily Show,” so her grasp of true life and the foibles that drive us mad is very secure. She takes our sense of what it means to be or support parents to a whole new level.
We first meet Colby and Nicholas when they are looking at the latest picture of their Baby Bump. They don’t see much, as is sometimes the case, but we soon learn that what they see is what they get! When the newborn is described, it sounds a bit more like Rosemary’s Baby than Nick and Colby’s. Do we see “Cassandra?” Nope. We see a bassinet with a brilliantly concocted cacophony of light and sound that inspires angst in audience and new parents alike. Nick’s brother Pete, with whom he works, is frat boy hale-fellow-well-met, who doesn’t realize the gravity of Nick and Colby’s situation until he drops by unexpectedly to meet his new niece. And THEN the fun begins …
Nick and Colby cope and melt down in different ways and Gus Ibranyi and Lilli Marques join forces again—they were in “boom” together last year—and respectively have created amazingly complex characters. They have such chemistry as a couple and it makes for a very believable descent into conflict as the play progresses. Brad Howell’s Pete is very like Peter Pan–a man who still thinks, and acts, a lot like the boy he remains on the inside. The pendulum swings for all three characters and even “Cassie” takes on a life of her own, as some children do, very, very early in their existence. Thought-provoking, disturbing and universal in scope, I came away hearing an echo of Charles Aznavour–what makes a person a person?
Performances are at Wharton Music Center, 60 Locust Ave., Berkeley Heights, from September 14 through 29, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday, September 23 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for Adults, $16 for Seniors/Students. For directions and tickets, call 908/472-1502, or visit the website at www.AllianceRep.org. Make sure to get your tickets early, this play will give you a lot to consider.