Funny how your opinion of one show can be changed by seeing another one. I came out of Georgia and Leona thinking it deserved a pretty solid 4-rating. Then I saw This is About the Push and actually changed my mind.
I liked both these shows, though. Georgia and Leona is a show of two separate monologues taking turns on stage. The first is that of Georgia (on the left in the promo photo above), who is inspired by a visit from her old friend Donna and the news that Donna has suddenly gotten married to reminisce about the past between them. The second is that of Leona, who, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the death of her friend Carl, was given a stack of old letters he wrote.
The two don’t interact at all, but there is a sort of kinship between them you can feel. Occasionally they’ll repeat bits of dialogue that the other has said. Both have become isolated by their pasts to some extent, Georgia emotionally so from growing up an orphan and her desire for a simple, stable life, Leona physically after her friend’s death shocked her into quitting her job and moving to a remote country home. Their stories are both pretty poignant on the subjects of friendship and love, and both actresses, Misha Bower and Lara Mrkoci (also the playwright and director, respectively), do a great job with their roles.
I did, however, experience a bit of a lull in the middle; clocking in at 75 minutes (note: not the 90 minutes your Fringe program states), it’s hard to keep an audience at rapt attention throughout in a show that’s lacking a bit in serious dramatic tension. Maybe it was that this was the middle of the afternoon and my third show of a six-show day, but my mind wandered more than a little in the middle of this show before coming back for the bittersweet conclusion.
The biggest reason I bumped that show down from a rating of 4 was because the show I saw right afterwards, This is About the Push, seemed to pack as much interesting storytelling into a play that’s half as long.
This is About the Push is sort of a deconstruction of an office pool party from the perspective of the wife of a recently-promoted low-level manager. It has that sort of 50’s Mad Men vibe that a lot of people seem to be suddenly nostalgic about nowadays, but Push uses it to good effect. Three women are discussing this party afterwards, and all the things that seemed innocent to the lead start to look rather sleazy and improper in retrospect. Kimwun Perehinec’s unnamed protagonist is questioned ruthlessly by two other unnamed characters, played by Jennifer Villeverde and Naomi Wright, who also take turns playing various roles of other male and female guests at the party.
All the women gossip and talk about how important their husbands are, while the men are all closed-off and business-like. The protagonist continues to insist that everyone was so nice and nothing bad happened, even as the story unfolds of how the big boss paid her a little more attention than appropriate, and how once the children went inside and the women all stripped down to jump in the pool the rest of the party went out of their way to make her look foolish and things took a bit of a sexual harassment-sort of turn. For the sake of “the push” for her husband’s career, though, no one really wants to talk about that. The way that everyone in the show repeatedly speak in platitudes about everything and everyone being “nice” and “lovely,” with no one saying what they really think, is almost haunting.
The show is pretty up my alley as someone who likes a careful consideration of what’s been said and strategizes about how to get messages across as part of my job and education, and at 35 minutes this was by far the shortest show so far on my Fringe schedule, a definite plus on a six-show day. This is to say that my rating might be a bit inflated for those reasons. Still, This is About the Push is one of my favourites of Fringe so far, and as this is a workshop production of part one of what will eventually be a three-parter, I’m certainly interested in the next two parts.