Sunday, September 21, 2008
A+E, Theater, Reviews

Going under

‘Finn’ takes audience on impenetrable journey

By Bert Osborne

Equally lurid and lugubrious, Jordan Harrison’s psychological thriller "Finn in the Underworld" is the theatrical equivalent of an irritating little brat who makes a big mess and leaves it for others (the audience) to clean up (make sense of). No doubt Harrison—and probably Actor’s Express artistic director Freddie Ashley, too—would argue that its openness to interpretation is deliberate, but one person’s "provocative" is another’s "inscrutable." (Consider how different it might be to watch "The Sixth Sense," for example, gathering all the clues you need to resolve the mystery, without ever being told a particularly climactic detail about the Bruce Willis character.)
 
In some moments of Ashley’s moderately creepy staging, Marianne Fraulo and Mira Hirsch portray estranged middle-aged sisters who, while sorting and packing the belongings of their late parents, unleash traumatic skeletons from the family closet. In others, they play them as young girls, as that original trauma is happening. Doyle Reynolds is their insinuating neighbor (either real or imagined). Or is he their grandfather, molesting small boys down in the fallout shelter? When Louis Gregory isn’t Finn, an "up-to-no-good" gay college student flirting with that neighbor, he’s an innocent pubescent falling victim to that dungeon pedophile.
 
It’s not exactly shocking when somebody intones, "There’s something in this strange house that makes people not themselves." Periodically, certain scenes and lines of dialogue are repeated from other perspectives and dimensions, but because the drama withholds much of an explanation or payoff, the general effect is heavy and pretentious, what Finn disparagingly describes as "talking around things without precision." In the end, to say that anything may mean anything is just a nicer way of saying that nothing means nothing.
 
Like the rest of the show, Kat Conley’s scenic design is a potentially intriguing idea, largely unfulfilled (based on the opening-night performance, at least). The walls of her set appear to be on tracks, and a few arches dangle overhead on wires, but if they’re supposed to move and close in on the characters during the play, the results are barely noticeable, let alone imposing or threatening. Harrison pretends he’s being "Chekhovian," and even the set is a tease.
 
The protagonist of Synchronicity’s "Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter" (by Julie Marie Myatt) is an Iraqi war vet mired in her own underworld of nightmares, guilt and futility. One of those symbolic walking wounded—but literally (she lost her leg in a bombing and wears a prosthetic)—Jenny eventually finds herself in a remote region of the American Southwest, where she joins a "desert freak show" of misfits who live in a commune called Slab City. Lots of soul-searching ensues, between life lessons about "trust among strangers" and such.
 
As staged by artistic director Rachel May—or as cast, more precisely—it’s an oddly impersonal drama. Andrea Washington’s Jenny is a rather delicate figure to be a battle-scarred ex-Marine, numbed by her experiences as much as angered by them, and less persuasive in dealing with the larger issues (losing her faith, debating the meaning of heroism, reconnecting with her family) than with comparatively minor concerns about whether some man deems her pretty enough to kiss. And, without exception, the Slab City supporting roles are far too ordinarily performed to be convincing as the eccentric free spirits who allegedly transform her.
 
Let’s hear it for Joe Sykes, then, who comes on so strong in an early scene (as a bus-station slacker) that you keep hoping he’ll show up to energize the goings-on. Tellingly, by the time we finally see him again, he’s fast asleep on the job. Like its heroine, the play loiters too aimlessly to be as forceful or gripping as it intends. SP