Our First Review
Theater review: An elf, a puzzle and a wild ride
By RICHARD WATTENBERG
In "If You Take One Elf Off the Shelf," Portland playwright Francesca Sanders takes late-night audiences at Theater! Theatre! on a wild ride. This play may be about a woman attempting to write a novel about her difficult relations with her father's young girlfriend, or it may be about the woman's effort to escape a very different and abusive set of family dynamics, or it may be a play about making a play.
It's pretty clear, however, that the audience is watching the woman, Danika, struggling to come to terms with some troubling issues. What exactly are these issues? What's at stake? What's true? What's fiction?
These Pirandello-like questions are the knots that the play beckons the spectator to undo. But ultimately Sanders seems to take more pleasure in tangling the viewer up in the play's multiple realities than in offering answers.
While the twisting, turning plot seems to go on longer than necessary, especially for late-night audiences, Sanders does engage us with her quartet of imaginatively conceived characters. In addition to poor, confused Danika, there's a fatherly, magical, human-sized elf; an earthy young woman who seems to enjoy walking in her frilly underwear and lap-dancing; and an earnest young actor who struggles to understand a drama in which he plays the role of a prim, if functionless, fellow.
As Danika, Erin McNamara is at first a bit tentative, but she settles nicely into the role -- finding lots of humor in the character's ambiguous predicament. The other three actors play their parts with the appropriate panache, comfortably slipping in and out of the play's different levels of reality.
For viewers who take on puzzles without solutions for the sheer pleasure of play, there is fun to be had when taking this elf off the shelf.
Continues 11 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Feb. 9;
Theater!Theatre! 3430 S.E. Belmont St.; $5, 503-970-7277.
By RICHARD WATTENBERG
In "If You Take One Elf Off the Shelf," Portland playwright Francesca Sanders takes late-night audiences at Theater! Theatre! on a wild ride. This play may be about a woman attempting to write a novel about her difficult relations with her father's young girlfriend, or it may be about the woman's effort to escape a very different and abusive set of family dynamics, or it may be a play about making a play.
It's pretty clear, however, that the audience is watching the woman, Danika, struggling to come to terms with some troubling issues. What exactly are these issues? What's at stake? What's true? What's fiction?
These Pirandello-like questions are the knots that the play beckons the spectator to undo. But ultimately Sanders seems to take more pleasure in tangling the viewer up in the play's multiple realities than in offering answers.
While the twisting, turning plot seems to go on longer than necessary, especially for late-night audiences, Sanders does engage us with her quartet of imaginatively conceived characters. In addition to poor, confused Danika, there's a fatherly, magical, human-sized elf; an earthy young woman who seems to enjoy walking in her frilly underwear and lap-dancing; and an earnest young actor who struggles to understand a drama in which he plays the role of a prim, if functionless, fellow.
As Danika, Erin McNamara is at first a bit tentative, but she settles nicely into the role -- finding lots of humor in the character's ambiguous predicament. The other three actors play their parts with the appropriate panache, comfortably slipping in and out of the play's different levels of reality.
For viewers who take on puzzles without solutions for the sheer pleasure of play, there is fun to be had when taking this elf off the shelf.
Continues 11 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Feb. 9;
Theater!Theatre! 3430 S.E. Belmont St.; $5, 503-970-7277.
posted by Brian at 1:40 PM
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