ITC's Ghost Writer

When you find yourself stranded in Union Station at around 2 a.m. on a Friday morning, after you've spent a significant number of hours waiting for a train in a seedy area of Long Beach, you ask yourself if the play you went down there to see was worth it.

And it was.

Paige White is crazy good. I can't believe the woman was able to peform for almost two hours whilst talking the whole time. There isn't a single moment in which she's not onstage, and she's constantly in dialogue with the other characters as part of her reminiscence or with the "inquisitor" character she's telling her story to.

She's amazing.

And for writing nerds like me, this was an excellent play that brings up many issues of intellectual property, mainly the biggest one: who does art belong to?

Throughout the play, we witness the progression of how Myra Babbage (White's character) begins her fifteen-year relationship with a writer. She starts off as a gifted typist with excellent grammar, punctuation and a high WPM score, but then we watch her put her foot down over a semicolon. Soon, she knows the manuscript better than the writer himself, and towards the end of their relationship, she predicts what he's going to say next and writes it - much to his surprise and amusement.

We watch this all unfold as a series of flashbacks and stories Babbage is recounting to a journalist who's been sent by the late writer's widow - a woman who was always jealous that Babbage could be of service to her husband in a way she could not. Because the plot unfolds through recollection, White is onstage the whole time, as she, of course, cannot remember moments she didn't participate in.

And why has the widow sent someone to interview Babbage? Because she's continued finishing the manuscript she and the writer were working on. Babbage claims that these are "his" words, that she sits down and waits for them to come. Some imagine she's seeing and talking to his ghost, and when she's asked if she's writing it, she describers herself as merely a typist.

It reminded me of the relationship between Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, and how some scholars now think that many of the work attributed to him was actually hers, but their styles became so similar that it is difficult to discern where one ends and one begins.  

Nicely done, International City Theatre!

T@BC's The Children

After seeing it 3 times, I can officially say I liked The Children, at The Theatre @ Boston Court.

Don't get me wrong: it moved me from the very first time I saw it, but it left me with so many mixed feelings that I didn't really know what to make of it.

I knew the play was going to be a take on the myth of Medea, and that someone was going to save the children from their fate. I even knew there were going to be puppets, but when the puppets first appeared, I was terrified.

We were sitting front and center, and they descended from the roof with a red light backdrop. They looked liked big, white voodoo dolls (I mistook the wires for really large needles) who'd been hung. It soon became clear that they were puppets, but it took a lot of disbelief to get past their creepiness for the rest of the show, and whenever a cast member would touch them or kiss their cheeks, I'd be reminded that they're puppets - not children - and I'd get creeped out all over again.

By the third time, the puppets were wonderfully endearing. I got to really appreciate their costumes - how they are made to look like little Greek children: the girl with the peplos a kore would wear, the boy whose hair resembled that of a kouros. I got to admire how much life Paige White and Sonny Valicenti breathed into the otherwise lifeless puppets with their emotion and their gestures.

And I got used to - and appreciated - the noise. There are many louds noises and lighting decisions that are purposefully meant to jolt you, replicating the shock of an accident upon impact. I hated these "interruptions" the first time and found them unnecessary, but I appreciated them so much more the next time.

Lastly, I LOVED the set design. We attended the talkback with the designer, and it was amazing to see how much metaphor is layered onto the set and how they reconciled what was going on in a child's imagination with what was happening in reality.

Overall, it was a deeply moving play with very wise choices, and I'm so glad I saw it more than once.