Double bill pairs drama and dance pieces
By Jospeh T. Rozmiarek
Special to The Advertiser
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The Late Night Theatre double bill entitled "Exposed" is part drama and part dance: "This is a Play" by Daniel MacIvor and "The Natalia Gallery" — six short dance pieces by various choreographers.
MacIvor's play will be fun for anyone who's ever tried acting, as it focuses on the inner thoughts of three performers as they appear in a sincerely awful rural drama in which heads of lettuce are important plot elements.
So it's a play inside a play as the novice but sincere performers try to focus on their craft, but realize only mixed success.
"I'm thinking of Uta Hagen," says the young girl (Erin Chung.)
"I'm thinking of Robert De Niro," says the young man (Kyle Peterson.)
"I'm thinking of Jack Daniels," says the mature actress (Jen Dickinson) who sneaks smokes backstage behind scenes.
The play also pokes fun at elementary stagecraft.
The young man has no ability to find his spotlight, but makes his entrance with great confidence, hoping only that the talent scout in the audience stays long enough to catch the scene in which he takes off his shirt.
The young woman is painfully tentative, and hovers on the fringes until she is prodded into a game of scene-stealing.
The mature actress can't abide the play, the playwright, or the director.
And everybody believes everybody else is a talentless hack, cast in the show only because of their extracurricular activities.
The sincerely awful drama reaches its conclusion with a mixture of lost babies reunited by identical tattoos.
Thankfully, MacIvor's play runs a short 30 minutes, which is about as long as its single joke can manage to support it.
Amy Healy directs and inserts some real-time references — like a nod to Pinter's "The Homecoming," which is being presented on the main Kennedy Theatre stage.
"The Natalia Gallery" is the second part of the evening, directed by Becky McGarvey, who choreographed three of the pieces and dances in one — "New York Social Life" —demonstrating that a string of recorded telephone messages can become the inspiration for modern dance.
