Author: Tom Williams

Most plays when they fail to work do so because of a lack of sufficient texture: characters are too broadly drawn, the setting lacks detail and nuanced specificity, the dialogue skirts true feeling in favor of stagy declarations. In these respects, Dana Lynn Formby’s new play If You Split a Second—receiving its world premiere with the Pegasus Players—is not like most plays. But that doesn’t necessarily means that it works either.

At times, Mascot feels as thought its attempting to do for personality disorders what Sarah Kane’s 2000 psycho-monologue Psychosis 4:48 did for clinical depression, isolating the psychological symptoms in a dramatic vacuum and giving them a more or less unrestrained ability to manifest themselves. The audience—like a room full of clinicians—is thus always on the outside looking in, giving us the sense that what we are watching is something much darker than lies ostensibly on the surface, i.e. a scene of frustrated bondage and unflagging sadism. A man beyond our help, but who nonetheless approaches us with all the charm and insinuating familiarity of a self-knowing psychopath. Someone who evokes our pity even as we think he might be oddly dangerous.

But all in all, Tea with Edie and Fitz needs desperately to learn how to walk before it can run, remembering in the last analysis that no amount of “literary” cleverness can substitute for emotional honesty and depth of character.