It’s
brave for a playwright, especially a New York playwright, to create an
unambiguously happy work in this day and age. Eric Alter does it in Something About You and the Fourth of July,
a play that unabashedly celebrates love, passion, art, and all that.
Sketch
(Daniel J. Scott) is having a bad life. He’s an artist who not only
can’t sell a painting, but is enduring the horrors of artist’s block; for most
of the play a blank canvas stares at him relentlessly from one corner of his
crummy apartment. He’s not doing too well at his day job, which he shares with
his ambitious childhood friend Chince (Larry Karpen). His Dad (Michael
Kerns), a rigid Man In a Suit type, doesn’t approve of anything he does.
Worst of all, he’s broken up with his sexy girlfriend, the Catherine Zeta Jones
look-a-like Elisabeth (Desiree Cobb), and his heartbreak seems to be the
fount of all his other problems. One night he meets the delicately pretty but
blind writer Remi (Mary Sheridan) and the world changes.
The
play follows Remi and Sketch’s sweet and nearly old-fashioned courtship (their
first date is to a park; they sleep with each other only after weeks of going
out). In the meantime Sketch’s other pals, the Bible-misquoting Preacher (Aarion
Kion) and Cookie (Jason Romas), along with Remi’s sister Susan (Heather
Sabella) and their friend Kyra (Bunita Tilley), act as a comic,
nervous, orbiting Greek chorus. Alter’s wit and insight keep the dialog from
being sitcommy or bathetic, even when Sketch visits his mother’s grave, red rose
in hand, to have a little talk with her about his new lady. This scene was also
saved by Bornstein’s clever direction. She had the couple’s friends comment on
their relationship from different places all over the stage. Lighting designer Jamie
Kimball’s spotlight fell on them one at a time.
Scott
was adorable as Sketch. With not one ironic bone in his body, his despair,
frustration, rage, compassion, and above all his deep, adolescently intense
love were genuine and raw. Sheridan’s Remi was waiflike, but as she tells the
perpetually worried Susan, not helpless. Sheridan brought out the character’s
intelligence and even a certain toughness. While the other actors were also
good, Romas was a scream as Cookie, Sketch’s big-hearted, wise-cracking gay
pal.
This
brings up a small quibble; Alter rather too strictly separates his characters
into those who are nice and those who Are Not. The audience is not supposed to
like Sketch’s Dad, or Chince, especially after a drunken scene when he and
Sketch finally celebrate a sale and spill some unpleasant truths. Elisabeth is
a horror; when she shows up late in the play to wreck Sketch’s life it seems
preposterous that he ever considered dating such an evil wench. The most
complex character is Susan; Remi calls her “the warden,” and for good reason.
Her overprotectiveness of her nearly thirty-year-old sister is irritating, but
it’s also clear that she acts, mostly, out of fearful love. Remi’s fragile
loveliness, fluty voice, and the fact that she was orphaned in childhood might
be flirting with stereotype (she could have looked and sounded like the
voluptuous Elisabeth, after all), and Sketch doesn’t have to have the black and
gay sidekicks to show that he’s a nice, liberal guy, but no matter. Alter does
make his Nice People folks the audience want to spend time with. They’re not
too good to be true.
Kimball’s
lighting design had a nearly cinematic quality to it, with rapid blackouts that
jumped all over the stage, from Remi and Susan’s place on stage right to
Sketch’s place on stage left, to the balcony that overlooked the stage where
Chince makes his increasingly frustrated cell phone calls to his twitterpated
artist friend. Using shabby, overstuffed couches and chairs, set designer Nicholas
L. Troccoli evoked the domiciles of struggling artist types. The music,
though canned, was appropriate and often funny; one comic, poignant scene had
Sketch wailing along with Air Supply’s “I’m All Out of Love,” using Elisabeth’s
old hairbrush as a microphone. Alter says his intent is to make the theatergoer
walk out of the theater feeling better than when she came in. In Something About You and the Fourth of July,
he succeeds.
Writing: 2
Directing: 2
Acting: 2
Sets: 2
Costumes: 1
Lighting/Sound: 2
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Copyright
2003 Arlene McKanic