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A lovely play about loneliness, missed and found connections, fame, love, fidelity and infidelity, and of course trust. Six characters are connected by a web of complex relationships, some romantic, some not, some unrequited, some committed, some casual, some hard to define, all changing.
Cody is a singer who just became famous; Becca is his fiancee; Leah is a singer who’s been well-known for a long time but is no longer a rising star; Gretchen is a dressmaker who’s making Becca’s wedding dress; Holly is a young groupie; Roy is a lonely DJ. The heart of the story is an unexpected slow-build romance between two of the women, which was not where I expected the story to go when I first read it and was a very pleasant surprise.
I’ve never seen it performed but it reads well, though Roy, who steals compulsively when he gets nervous, probably comes across better in performance. In reading, he’s the one character who felt more like a concept than a real person. Otherwise, though highly structured in that everyone is connected to each other in no more than one degree of separation, it has a very realistic feeling. It makes me think of looking out a window and seeing people passing by on the street, and wondering what relationship you might have with each one if you actually got to meet.
This is my favorite play by Dietz. He’s best-known for Lonely Planet, which I also like a lot, a two-person play about two gay men. Jody owns a map shop, and his friend Carl keeps coming in with a chair, which he leaves behind when he goes until the shop and stage are filled with them. Each chair belonged to someone who died of AIDS, and the cluttered stage becomes both a visualization of the space that mourning and fear takes up in our minds, and an AIDS quilt-like memorial for those who have died.
Cody is a singer who just became famous; Becca is his fiancee; Leah is a singer who’s been well-known for a long time but is no longer a rising star; Gretchen is a dressmaker who’s making Becca’s wedding dress; Holly is a young groupie; Roy is a lonely DJ. The heart of the story is an unexpected slow-build romance between two of the women, which was not where I expected the story to go when I first read it and was a very pleasant surprise.
I’ve never seen it performed but it reads well, though Roy, who steals compulsively when he gets nervous, probably comes across better in performance. In reading, he’s the one character who felt more like a concept than a real person. Otherwise, though highly structured in that everyone is connected to each other in no more than one degree of separation, it has a very realistic feeling. It makes me think of looking out a window and seeing people passing by on the street, and wondering what relationship you might have with each one if you actually got to meet.
This is my favorite play by Dietz. He’s best-known for Lonely Planet, which I also like a lot, a two-person play about two gay men. Jody owns a map shop, and his friend Carl keeps coming in with a chair, which he leaves behind when he goes until the shop and stage are filled with them. Each chair belonged to someone who died of AIDS, and the cluttered stage becomes both a visualization of the space that mourning and fear takes up in our minds, and an AIDS quilt-like memorial for those who have died.
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