The Making of a Great Moment

Tweet

The Making of a Great Moment by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and directed by James Barry is a play about a pair of actors who are the principal players and only members of a bicycle theatrical touring company. It is a delightfully light-hearted story that takes us with them as they travel across New Hampshire with a show exploring the idea that “Great Moments” can happen unexpectedly. It is a show worth spending time with, although there are occasional bumps, flat tires, and rain storms in the journey.

Terry Dean (Bill Bowers) and Mona Barnes (Esther Williamson) are an unlikely pair. He is a seasoned pro, having performed in 407 shows all over Canada, and she has much less experience, having only done plays in theaters in British Columbia and with The Victoria, Canada Bicycle Theatre Company. She and Terry are the only members of that company, and they are now venturing into the United States to perform their four-hour play, Great Moments in Human Achievement.

They have very different ideas on what this whole exercise is about, with Terry seeing it as a necessary way of keeping himself in the “game” of acting while holding out hope that it will get him a job in a major venue. Mona sees this as a way of extending the reach of the acting profession and, by extension, creative arts to communities unfamiliar with the dramatic arts.

Bowers and Williamson use the play within a play structure of the show to bring their characters’ idiosyncratic ideas and behaviors to life in funny and sad ways, with moments of pure comedy and moments of near tragedy. They deliver the contrasting personalities with a clarity that highlights the choices people make in pursuing the things they use to define themselves and their place in the world.

The flow from the touring company production to the in-between introspective play is skillfully done. However, some of those in-between moments are unclear in their focus on the innermost thoughts of the two characters. How deeply do we care about the personal psychological struggles these characters have over their choice of profession when all is said and done? Is Terry doing it because he has spent so much time acting that there is nowhere else to go? Is Mona so wrapped up in her idealism towards theater that she cannot see the reality of her present situation? There is no clear answer to these questions, and perhaps that is the answer.

Matt Whiton, the scenic and projection designer, faced the challenge of presenting, on a small stage, two people bicycling across New Hampshire. He succeeds in that challenge by using background projections of forest roads with the characters in the foreground, pedaling real bikes mounted on stationary platforms. The position of the bikes is changed from scene to scene to support the illusion of the characters moving through the countryside as they bike from one venue to the next.

Another difficult task in the staging is lighting. John Salutz’s lighting direction effectively moves the scenes from the acting venues’ interior locations to the bicycling countryside’s wide-open spaces. The costume design by Charles Schoonmaker works well with the various scene changes, including some ingenious use of sleeping bags for different effects. The sound design by Tom Shread is supportive of the whole of the production.

The Making of a Great Moment (through October 29, 2023)

Urban Stages Theater, 259 West 30^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit https://urban-stages.ticketleap.com/the-making-of-a-great-moment/t/Website/

Running time: 95 minutes without intermission