On Camera/Off Center
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| Colleen Delany, Michael Chernus and Eric Sutton in "Jump Cut." Photo by Stan Barouh. |
"Jump/Cut"
Woolly Mammoth and Theater J at
DCJCC's Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theatre
1529 16th St. NW, Washington, DCFebruary 24-March 30, 2003-03-25
Wed., Thurs., Sat., Sun. evenings; Fri. & Sun. matinees
Tickets: $10-$34
Box Office: 800-494-8497
www.woollymammoth.net or www.theaterj.org.
All contemporary plays about "relationships" are alike but each character with bipolar disorder is electrifying in his own hellish fashion.
Neena Beber's new play "Jump/Cut" pairs a couple of yuppie filmmakers with a manic depressive writer manqué to ask some big questions. What price friendship? What price significant art? What makes life register as more than mere existence? Beber's filmmakers are too shallow and self-absorbed to handle any really serious discussions. But, oh, their ludic, lunatic friend. By the end of the play his wisecracks, puns, vision, and refusal to hide add up to an unforgettable character and an untenable situation.
Cinema is the playwright's guiding trope as well as her characters' obsession. Paul (Eric Sutton) is an affable, thirtyish wannabe director who narrates the story of his lifelong friendship with the zany and truly ill Dave (Michael Chernus). Beginnings, Paul tells us, don't exist till you get to the end and can start looking back. It is his looking back from a moment that both opens and closes the play that generates a story. . Deep into shooting the film that he hopes will put him on the map as an artist, he reminds us that he is the one who gets to decide what we'll see. Unfortunately, although he videotapes his friend nonstop (the film transfer comes later), he fails to recognize the implications of much of what's going on around him. He's too busy worrying about missing details and establishing "credibility" to pull back and contemplate the big picture.
We meet Paul and Dave in high school, where already the rumpled, funny, and analytical Dave predicts he's going to end up a bum and begs Paul not to leave him behind. Fast forward to the present. And yes, verbal devices like "fast forward" are how Beber moves us through her story. Schleppy Dave begs preppie Paul for a place to stay. Paul imagines it'll be till Dave gets back on his feet. The reality is that Dave can't get off the couch, much less dressed and out the door. He lives in a world of potato chips, unwashed clothes, endless TV, and secret, infrequent attempts to write a brilliant novel.
Paul, meanwhile, meets and falls for the pretty, intelligent, but self-doubting Karen (Colleen Delany). Karen is written as a collection of supposedly intellectual and emotionally deep attributes. She adores Dostoyevsky, is working on a doctoral project about a countess who devoted decades to being photographed, and she gets to recite a longish list of famous artists who suffered manic depression, thereby shoring up her braininess and making the disease seem somehow respectable. It's one of the playwright's too-frequent instances of telling rather than showing. Delany's drama school speech further distances us from sympathizing with her character.
Karen moves in with Paul, which means moving in with Dave, too. When neither Dave's life nor Paul's career seems to be going anywhere, it's Karen who suggests a documentary about what it's like to live inside Dave's head.
The heart of this smooth production, directed by Leigh Silverman, is Michael Chernus's Dave. Chernus comes across as a hybrid between a teddy bear and a grungy kid with Attention Deficit Disorder. All the scenes that are more than predictable soul searching are his, as he flops from irony to angst, sarcasm to wisdom, and finally to unsalvageable despair. Dave delivers one liners like "Where's your bourgeois de vivre?" which Chernus manages simultaneously to send up and make memorable. He also stuns us with an episode in which Dave verges on meltdown because he's convinced that NASA is trying to move the planet and that "they" are trying to fly into his body. From a distance, Chernus's Dave could be any "crazy" on the street. In this context Chernus convinces us that Dave is the smartest guy Paul ever knew and the one who really understands Karen.
Like Karen, we wish Dave would get off the couch. Like Paul, we can take a certain guilty, superior satisfaction in the fact that Dave's being on the couch reminds us that we're not. Chernus is by turns playful, insightful, sarcastic, self-aware, adorable, and disgusting. You halfway want Karen to run off with him when he confesses his love for her. You also believe him when he calls his trust fund a "lack of trust fund"-something set up by the father who never believed Dave would be able to take care of himself.
The production's visual world is minimal realism embedded
in filmic commentary. Erhard Rom's set features hints of a nondescript living
room, bedroom, and dining room surrounded and ceilinged with frames suggesting
overlapping screening rooms. Wisely, we are never shown any of Paul's actual
footage, but the flickering light and sound of a running projector remind
us that watching and shooting life aren't the same as living it. As Paul
begs Dave to go back on his medication, Dave refuses to return to the zombiedom
that keeps him stable but numb. Realizing that his novel is a failure and
that Paul's film is inchoate, he makes a final effort to finish one thing
properly. The film needs a conclusion. Overmedication provides the final
reel and the final piece/peace. [Chansky]
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