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Lost City loses its way
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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Lost City
By Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, in collaboration with Company One Ensemble. Directed by Victoria Marsh. Set by Sarah Shampnois. Lighting by Krista McCann. Sound by Elizabeth Fuller. With Keith Mascoll, Shawn LaCount, Naya Chang, Mark Abby VanDerzee, Michelle Baxter, Hilary Fabre, Summer L. Williams, and Mason Sand. At the Boston Center for the Arts through March 27.
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Company One’s Lost City is a new play that lumbers clumsily along a very worn premise. When eight strangers are stranded at a Rochester (New York) airport waiting for a delayed flight to Boston, their claustrophobic quarters and the reckless chattiness that accompanies sleep deprivation at pre-dawn hours result in the octet’s becoming quite chummy. So chummy, in fact, that they offer advice to and pass judgment on one another. But Lost City, as the program declares, is an experimental work. And though it’s non-naturalistic enough in its tableau-like form to qualify, the troupe of capable performers would be better served (as would the audience) by material that’s more provocative, insightful, and stimulating than a drowsy crowd lobbing around sorry autobiographies and trite condemnations on society. We gather the pitiful details about these travelers — their crumbling families, their out-of-reach career aspirations, their physical deficiencies — through their conversations and confrontations, monologues divulged with strained expressiveness under a spotlight, and the dream-sequence-like spoken-word routines interspersed throughout. Each individual is pursuing someone or something, a personal "lost city," but collectively, the quest for Shangri-La is characterized more by la-la-land froth than by the hard-edged bite we expect from experimental theater. Company One’s ensemble developed the show with two-time National Endowment for the Arts playwriting fellowship winners Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, the duo behind NPR’s Hitchhiking Off the Map. Bishop and Fuller want their urban microcosm to alert us to the opportunities we miss by failing to open up to the people around us. But that message is only faintly suggested by the assembly of token characters nattering in group-therapy fashion about their predictable problems. Hilary Fabre’s suitably neurotic Angie is a Hollywood type who drops self-help/neo-enlightenment jargon into conversation as freely as she offers pills from the pharmacy she carries in her pocketbook. Naya Chang’s Viola is a mousy Chinese violin virtuoso prone to quick angry outbursts who’s off to launch a performance career. Shawn LaCount’s Ezra is a not-entirely-out banker returning from San Francisco to chase down his longed-for "friend" in the Hub. He clashes with Mark Abby VanDerzee’s stereotypical tough guy. Michelle Baxter’s Wilma is a proud yet anxious African-American mom headed to help her son, who’s in trouble with the law; Baxter flaunts versatility as Wilma supplies churchy wisdom on faith and love with humor and fury. The clown role is filled by Mason Sand, who’s Christopher Guest goofy as a shy, suspicious twerp lurking in a corner. Sand’s character oozes nervousness; he’s on the hunt for his parents and is hoping to find buyers for his "sculptures," cardboard cutouts held together by tape. There’s also a character running the show in Stage Manager fashion, but Lost City is miles from Our Town. Keith Mascoll’s Kareem is a slick, ghetto-cool playwright who’s socially suffocated because he’s too involved with the worlds he creates in his art. "If I could only love human beings the way I love my characters," he laments. He’s on his way back from Chicago, where his play was repeatedly rejected. So now, stuck as he is in the terminal, he inverts his creative process and turns the human beings into characters, scribbling furiously as he listens and, at times, directs. Taking his cue from the Tom Tykwer film Lola rennt, he commands characters to "make it go different"; this allows us to see a fiery confrontation played over with less animosity or a heartfelt confession enacted a second time more cynically. Kareem reveals his promise as a writer, turning verbal somersaults and ruminating over language, but your sympathy for his failed artistic enterprises is apt to be short-lived. After all, if these are the characters that people his dramas, no wonder his plays get turned down.
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