Review: Dying City at FronteraFest [theater]

It's a hell of a premise for a play: Kelly's husband, Craig, dies in Iraq. She spends the following year as a virtual hermit, sitting on her couch and watching television, having disconnected her phone. Late one night, finally, Craig's twin brother, Peter, shows up at her door. The potential for drama here is incredible—what's it like to see the spitting image of a dead spouse unexpectedly appear before you, a year after he died? And the author knows he's on to something, dropping bombshells like, "I asked you to have a baby with me" into the mix, and ratcheting up the tension. It'd take a serious amount of effort to fuck this up.

But that's what the script to Dying City does, cluelessly and clumsily. Because, it seems, rather than explore these questions, playwright Christopher Shinn—who was nominated for a Pulitzer for this shit—would rather tell the audience what he thinks of Law & Order and Jon Stewart. Seriously.

As the most recent entrant into Capital T's high-caliber New Directions program, in which a promising first-time director is given the reigns to a long-fringe FronteraFest piece, director Derek Kolluri demonstrates solid instincts in everything except for script selection. He creates a subtle, compelling set that offers huge amounts of insight into Kelly's personality—the trunk for a coffee table, the tiny LCD television screen of someone who is ashamed of a newfound TV addiction— and seems pretty confident in most of his choices. Entire scenes are conducted with the television on and Ice-T chewing scenery in an episode of SVU while the characters jabber on about how self-aware they are, and how much they love to articulate it. In a great play, this conviction that he's got you paying close attention would be really powerful—here, it's just an encouraging sign that Kolluri's going to be a director to watch.

He also succeeds in pulling from Liz Fisher a tremendous performance that borders on genuinely affecting, no mean feat given how poorly sketched her character is on the page. Fisher manages to find a throughline in a character who, given the play's broken chronology—the play alternates between flashbacks to the night Craig left for Iraq, and the present, with Peter's visit—seems to forget things that she knows and conversations that she had. While her character's statements and reactions to Peter at the beginning of the play seem to ignore what transpired before Craig shipped out (a scene we only witness at the end), Fisher nonetheless brings a consistency that keeps us grounded in her story. It's a rare performer that can drop a line like, "Leave my home! I need to be alone!" near the end of an unconvincing drama and not get the audience laughing, but Fisher is that sort of artist.

All of this sounds backhanded, but it's not really meant to be. Fisher really is outstanding here, and Kolluri does demonstrate an exciting amount of potential. (Mark Scheibmeir, who plays both Craig and Peter, is functional in his dual role, but plays both parts in a way that makes it hard to connect with either of them.) But those things aren't usually enough to recommend a play—the damn thing has to tell a satisfying story. Dying City, with its focus on treating its characters as an outlet for the playwright's views about both the war and pop-culture minutiae, doesn't come anywhere close. We'll be watching to see what Kolluri does next, because he looks to be capable of a lot—he just needs to find a worthy story.

(Full disclosure: The author of this review was a candidate for the New Directions program.)