REVIEWS

Playwright Bruce Graham and director BJ Jones—who two years ago collaborated on Northlight Theatre’s successful production of The Outgoing Tide—have once more come together to bring us the world premiere of Graham’s new play, Stella & Lou, which again tackles issues of aging, loneliness and loss. And sure, Stella & Lou may exert all the stirring impact of a strong cup of Earl Grey, but it’s not as if its trying to move mountains either. Stella & Lou is a small story about modest people, set within the tiny walls of an old Philly bar. And while it never approaches the level of revelatory, Stella & Lou at least manages to be insightful.

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.