Playwright: Alice Austen
At: Prop Thtr, 3502-3504 West Elston Ave.
Phone: 539-7838; $25
Runs through: March 28
Lying, we all know, is wrong, and so, to allay our fundamental distrust of fiction, we endeavor to find connections between artists and their art. But while witnessing an individual work through their personal problems may be amusing on occasion, seldom do we consider it a privilege for which we should pay admission. And so we also require artists to bring something MORE than themselves to their art.
Alice Austen, however, has written a play about a play—no, make that a play about the WRITING of a play, the latter based on the story of Prometheus—in which its would-be progenitor bends his metaphor to reflect the events of his OWN life, ignoring fundamental questions about his text's internal logic. And because the members of the play-reading committee who ask the questions are a bunch of jerks, we are expected to APPLAUD his action.
Well, haven't we seen plays that convey EXACTLY what the playwright was doing, or reading, before sitting down at his typewriter/word processor? And haven't we seen power-glutted judges pick at an idea simply to exhibit their alleged expertise? Under the direction of veteran farceur Steve Scott, the discussion of our hero's literary submission is conducted by self-serving caricatures, led by Natalie West doing her reliable batty-old-lady turn.
If Austen's real-world storyline had been likewise comic, her play could have emerged as behind-the-scenes satire. After all, from the moment that the author's harshly critical father enters, coughing and wheezing, we know he will die, after the usual filial ranting and weeping. As serious fare, however, William J. Norris renders him so instantly repellent that his deterioration moves us no more than does the distress it inflicts upon his son, nebulously portrayed by Harry Eddleman. We've seen THIS play before, and it's got nothing to do with the flame-snatcher of Mount Olympus.
Michael Fosberg's stentorian-voiced Prometheus and Ericka Ratcliff's gentle Chorus reward us somewhat for our patience as Austen recounts her gestational complaints. But two hours of dramatis personae making conversation with nothing to say ultimately calls to mind, not Greek myth, but another familiar scenario—the one by Jean-Paul Sartre about being trapped in similar circumstances.