Review: “The Fall Show” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage

TEXT OF REVIEW:

The boomer generation runs from almost eighty down to sixty two. The partying ended a long time ago, the next generation is grown, friends move away, or die. Cognition slowly fades.

These years can lead to loneliness for the single person, tempered by the joys of privacy and the ability to throw off social filters that now seem pointless. 

A connection, particularly a sexual one, can sound impossible

The Fall Show, a world premiere production created by Erika Chong Shuch and Charles Mee, now at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage through October 25th, takes an often dreamlike look at that time in life.

There’s a play in there somewhere in which an older severe looking leftist woman, a no-nonsense never suffer fools Beth Wilmurt, meets an older divorced working class man, an often poetic but never enigmatic Reginald Wilkins, on a park bench near where both live. The Fall Show takes us through the meeting to the realization that maybe something more is going on, and beyond. Different races, backgrounds, education levels. The problem is commonality, or its lack.

Surrounding and sometimes overwhelming the two are six players, an audiovisual Greek chorus, who act out the emotion behind the words, which include singing, dancing — most notably Marit Brook-Kothlow from the Joe Goode Performance Group — violence against dinner plates, and Magritte-like tableaux.

As co-creator and director Erika Chong Shuch notes, in creating the piece, she gave herself explicit permission, instruction, in her words, to trust the deep gut, to keep faith that the abstract means something.

And therein lies both failure and success. It takes a while for the connection to be made between the story slowly unfolding on the bench, and the actions of the other players. When the two elements work, it’s theatrical gold. But often times, the results are head scratching. Luckily, when that happens, the performance and dialogue of the two leads keeps the Fall Show together.

This is an attempt to put on stage the feelings and thoughts of aging, of loneliness, of finding and losing affinity, of reaffirming one’s sexuality.

By stretching boundaries between theatre and other visual forms, The Fall Show doesn’t always work, but then there are those moments of epiphany when you suddenly realize, you get it.

(This is theatre taking chances, pushing the envelope. Not for everybody, but then what is?)

The Fall Show, created by Erika Chong Shuch and Charles Mee, plays at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage through October 25th. For more information, you can go to shotgun players.Org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA.

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