| . | 04/20/2008
UMBRELLA
By: Eugene Paul
Helen wakes to find herself on a rooftop, ten stories up. Also on the rooftop is Frank, off in a corner, smoking, his cigarette glowing in the dark. Some windows of neighboring buildings are lit. Traffic, people noises are muted. It could be romantic, it could be odd, it could be—full of possibilities. How did Frank get her up there? Where did he find her? Why did he do it? What had happened to her? Why didn’t she remember how she got up there?
We’ll never know. Playwright Larry Pontius is not interested in such details, fascinating though they may be. It takes us a while to find out that we are not going to find out because our playwright has his mind elsewhere and such details matter not a whit to him. His focus is on the impossibility of lonely, closed off people meeting at all in the big, anonymous city, people with little, frustrated lives who do things which fill up a little of the emptiness and frustration. Helen cuts herself, we learn. It makes her feel something. Frank is a voyeur. He watches other people live, as he does not. They are each of them friendless, half mad with longing for some kind of human contact, yet afraid, suspicious, shut off. Except for cigarettes. Frank has a full pack. She bums cigarette after cigarette. He’s glad to give them to her. They almost touch. She is dressed oddly but well. He is dressed like a million others who do not care how they dress. (Scenic and Costume designer Lea Umberger has done a fine job.) On the roof top is a chair, a tin can for cigarette butts and an umbrella. It hasn’t rained in months.
Through a long night of idiosyncrasies, Helen and Frank get to know each other well enough to attack one another, threaten one another, expose thier failings, weaknesses, foibles, with the outcome of their encounter always in question and their rapprochement stifled by their crippled psyches. Such exposures and concealments have their own fascinations and, were it not for the interaction between the two actors, Judson Jones and Christa Kimlicko Jones, under the skilled direction of Padraic Lillis, we could not have remained rapt, at attention, willing to forgive the gaps and lapses in playwright Pontius’s chronicle of two damaged human beings trying to reach out to each other.
We have seen that scenario time and again. Yet Umbrella finds something more to say about the human condition. And thanks to fine performances, the gaps and lapses are overridden as we watch., until the final moments of the playwright’s attempts to give voice to something positive, something reachable for the two of them. Here, even his actors and his directors cannot rescue him. Here, the umbrella of the title is so patently false, it is something of a shock. The end of the play reduces further, to the point of embarrassment. Had Pontius remained true to his bleak vision, he would have had a small tragedy but an honest one. Instead, he has chosen the least palatable of happy endings. The choice is in its way very unhappy. Frank and Helen should have been allowed their small, terrible fates,. They earned them.
Kirk Theater on Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street. Tickets:$35, seniors$20, student rush $15. Ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200.
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