Off Broadway West does FICTION by Steven Dietz
FICTION
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Off Broadway West Theatre Company is presently staging FICTION by Steven Dietz.
If you ever secretly suspected you lacked a first language, had an attention deficit disorder or had an audio processing deficiency, this play is for you. It will hold you riveted from the time the klieg lights begin to glow until the cast has taken their final bows or curtsies.
Dietz makes excellent use of language: like a marine mammal trainer at Sea World, Dietz gets English to jump through flaming hoops. If you enjoy intelligent dialogue, Dietz is your playwright.
The play involves a married couple, both of who are successful writers. Two writers, two Thesauruses and one writers' camp. Realistically, would we want to listen in on their conversations only to learn they communicate in Pigeon or Cracker English using People Magazine for conversational grist? Would we expect them to leave their participles dangling from Formica crowned tables in fast food bistros?
If you enjoyed the erudite bantering and verbal sparing performed by William Powell and Myrna Loy in W.S. Van Dyke's THE THIN MAN, then again: this play is your cup of sassafras. The play relies almost exclusively on dialogue; there is little action and yet Director Richard Harder, to his credit, gives the play the fast pace feel one would ordinarily expect from an action adventure: kind of an Indiana Jones in the drawing room.
The plot synopsis in a filbert nutshell would run roughly like the following: Serendipitously, two American writers go to the same Paris café: it is lunch hour and so naturally there is only one remaining chair and one table available. (Oh those French, they are such romantics: one might wonder: "Where do they hide all the empty chairs?")
The play fast-forwards to the female writer's miss-diagnosis for terminal cancer. When she learns the dire prognosis, she has less than two weeks to live. To ensure that all her journal writing has not been in vain, she insists that her husband read nearly every journal she has filled: all of them except the one journal with the really alarming stuff.
Naturally, when wife offers up her journals for her husband's perusal, she expects reciprocity. The husband hesitates and of course the demand for reciprocity becomes more clarion. What a way to spend one's final days: coming to terms with all the things a good healthy denial mechanism would have ordinarily protected and comfortably insulated you from.
In a sense there is a reciprocal death: the husband, as imagined by the wife, dies when her illusions of him are spattered by the truth documented in his steamy journals. She on the other is slated for a death more literal than journal entries would precipitate.
Given the facile urgency with which Dietz bumps off the female lead, one would assume he was raised under the tutelage of Ernest Hemingway. While there is no Harry's Bar in the play, there is that cozy little bistro, café or lunch wagon in Paris; as Bogey would say, "We'll always have Paris."
Dietz has crafted a superlative play and the Off Broadway West Theatre Company has given it the intimacy and quality performance it deserves. For a most enjoyable evening, at 414 Mason Street, contact the ticket office at 415 440-6163.
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