Playwright: Ellen Fairey
At: The Athenaeum Studio
Phone: ( 312 ) 902-1500; $10-$15
Runs through: Feb. 5
Ellen Fairey's first full-length drama after several one-act works and short stories is a half-good play in a half-good world premiere by Serendipity Theatre Company, in association with Terrapin Theatre Company. Set at a university, its three characters are Sam, a psychology grad student of repressed—and possibly questionable—sexuality; Marty, a film school undergraduate party animal who fucks everything with tits that twitches; and Jade, a creative writing student.
For reasons never explained, Jade seeks counseling at the university psych clinic where Sam secretly observes her sessions and videotapes them—Marty operates the equipment—for later study. For reasons that are also unclear, Sam obsesses about Jade, whom Marty arranges for Sam to meet before he—Marty—sleeps with her. A male-centric play despite its female authorship, it revolves around Marty getting under Sam's skin. Jade is a catalyst, nothing more, and certainly a meaningless notch on Marty's well-carved bedpost.
Performed without intermission, the problem with girl, 20 ( sic ) is that the first half feels and sounds like a playwriting exercise in which two disparate people are forced together in a confined setting to see what happens. In this case, reticent and repressed Sam and careless and ebullient Marty must share the tiny secret viewing room ( cleverly realized by scenic designer Sam Porretta as a nearly perfect cube constructed of canvas, soft and amorphous but claustrophobic ) . I don't believe for a second that buttoned-up Sam would put up with sophomoric and crotch-driven Marty, let alone become unglued in front of him.
The play becomes interesting only with the late addition of Jade, a minimally-evolved character necessary to the action who adds complexity to the play's voicing. But since we don't hear Jade until Sam has become snagged on her, we don't understand Sam's infatuation. If Fairey allowed us to see and hear Jade's psych sessions all along, we would more fully buy her premise. As it stands, we know too little about any of the trio to empathize with them. Sam, the pivotal character, never evolves beyond dour and unhappy. girl, 20 seems incomplete.
It's possible I missed some important exposition, for director Matthew Miller consistently has actors Walter Thon ( Sam ) and Rachel Sondag ( Jade ) portray intimacy by speaking so softly they cannot be heard in the fifth row of a 75-seat theater. Too-soft-to-hear is not the same as either intimate or intense. The quiet technique also loses several potential laughs with which Fairey wisely leavens the script. Only Rob Belushi as Marty is audible all the time, and not because he's shouting. Son of Jim Belushi, he's sharpening his acting chops as just another young Off-Loop actor, and more power to him. He brings boyish, raffish charm and a shot of energy to girl, 20.