![]() Jenn Bock gives Denise a brash rawness to buffer her interpersonal inexperience the vulnerability peeking through the gaps in her armor never gives over to gooey pathos. Everyone, at least our principals, wants to change. Within the theatrical compression of time (within an hour-and-a-half strangers become friends, betray, seduce, reconcile, etc.) we see inside each character's existential dilemma and witness these disparate, searching selves at once align then clash. Synopses be damned, they go round and round. Her booze conduit and referee of the proceedings is bartender Murk (Jared Sanz-Agero). She's 32 and a drunk, having once been bound for the convent. Slumped at the bar and rising occasionally to interject is April (Colleen Backer), former classmate of both Denise and Linda. She's distraught, as her fella, Tony Aronica (Eric Dean White) has begun stepping out, telling Linda he seeks “ugly girls.” Tony's 32, leather-trousered, and fed up with the self-identity he's allowed himself to create and inhabit. She's 32, streetwise, and a baby-making sexpot. Enter Linda Rotunda (Julie Venegoni) also loosed from Mother's apartment. She's 32, a reader, and socially backward. Denise Savage (Jenn Bock) is out alone (again) to escape the apartment she shares with her mother. It's the mid-1980s, but that's merely by dint of when Shanley wrote the thing no Alexander Haig or Cyndi Lauper gags, I promise, just some mention of the Soviet Union. In Savage in Limbo Shanley lays out a Monday night in a Bronx bar, wherein the patrons are giving themselves a good once-over. Clearly, the cat can write, regardless what becomes of some of his word-smithery when it leaves his hands-such is the fate of the playwright and screenwriter. I'd be remiss if I failed to throw in Alive, the one about the Andes-crashing, long-pig noshing soccer players, and the Spielberg-produced animation We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story, featuring the voice talents of the lates Julia Child and Walter Cronkite. He penned Congo (stop it!) and directed the film adaptation of his own Pulitzer and Tony winning play Doubt, almost universally heralded as a cinematic triumph. He wrote the gem Moonstruck, and the mess Joe Versus the Volcano. Like many other noted playwrights, Shanley has devoted a fair portion of his career to scripting (and even directing) film. Whether you know it or not, you're more than likely familiar with the work of playwright John Patrick Shanley, though this piece is not among his more famous works. In the case of Savage in Limbo, great credit is due director Annamaria Pileggi and her fine cast. That OnSite can pull this off without coming off gimmicky, but really laying out a night of quality performance points up their commitment to their mission and their craft. If those folks who do Shakespeare in Forest Park were taking the OnSite approach-going all commando, rocks and trees and grass-stains and I-don't-know-what-all-I might be more on board. Too much intentional lighting, sound or staging and you've not so much used a non-theater space as gone ahead and turned it into a theater. The magic is that the show is happening in the space, on the furniture, among us and without the proverbial net. Sit where you like, the actors will adjust or go right through you. Producers of site-specific theater visit upon themselves an extra set of challenges and obstacles. But still, a rock club is a tiny theater. Musicals have toured such rock clubs ( Hedwig and the Angry Inch) to great response, and improv groups have done residencies therein. In my many years of residence in rock clubs, I often thought, what if? What would happen if one of the slots on a three-band bill was a monologue or short one-act, wedged between Emo & the SadTones and STONESLUDGE? Would people riot, would they get it? What about a whole play? Of course, as I was having these thoughts, such things were already afoot and dong quite well. ![]() ![]() While putting on plays in non-traditional settings is nothing brand new, it's encouraging that a company in St. The script and the site are a match made in, if not heaven, then as close as one finds in the outer boroughs. Later this season, Clayton fitness center Sweat gets the treatment-should we bring our own towels? Their current offering, at the aforementioned Maplewood watering-hole, is John Patrick Shanley's existential express train Savage in Limbo, whose action plays out in a Bronx bar. OnSite Theatre Company, as their name would indicate, creates site-specific productions, and have inhabited a range of spaces over their five years, from a bowling alley to a photo studio to a youth hostel. ![]() They haven't just enjoyed an evening's performance, nor are they popping in for a pre-show belt. The bar in question is Cusumano's, and the guys and gals are theater-goers. ![]()
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