I saw it on Thurs and it did not yet seem fully ready for audiences. Two instances of line being called and a general sense of tentativeness and dropped cues in the second act.
The play itself was a miss for me. Despite a promising premise- an older committed gay couple in rural Arizona in the early 90s takes a third- it does surprisingly little with it. The setting is not explored at all and the time period is utilized only to address AIDS in a hamfisted way. The play takes place over several years in time jumps, and those time jumps are mostly used to fast forward to relationship conflicts, so we never see this throuple as a functioning relationship. Their third (Ken Barnett, somehow making this role work) is haunted and damaged by trauma that is so immediately obvious, yet the revelation of it is teased out until the last third of the play. What we get are repetitious scenes of a damaged man driving a wedge into a relationship, while Spinella’s character frets about his health problems and mortality for several years and essentially rehashes the Prior/Louis conflict from Angels while apparently making the argument that the best reason to be in a throuple is to have a spare partner. The play’s ending rang so false and sappy and out of step with the rest of the piece to me that I left rather annoyed about it.
So while things will tighten up- and they need to at 2.5 hours- and I’m sure revisions will be made, I’m just not sure it’ll be something I can really recommend.
"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
