Erin Joy Schmidt and Ricky Waugh in Dying City.(Photo by George Schiavone)
By Hap Erstein
Talk about switching gears. After planning to produce the entertaining, but empty British farce Boeing-Boeing, Plantation’s Mosaic Theatre abruptly changed course to present instead Christopher Shinn’s shifting, shifty contemporary drama, Dying City.
It was a smart move for artistic director Richard Jay Simon, who traded up to a powerful play by an important emerging writer. Shinn understands the art of withholding information – from his characters, as well as his audience – and releasing it slowly and deliberately for maximum effect. Never doubt that he is in control of his storytelling, which seems not to add up. Until it does.
Like Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll, which began the season at Mosaic, Dying City contains more characters than actors. In this case, there is a pair of identical twins, who could not be more different in every way but looks, played deftly by Ricky Waugh.
When we first see him, he is Peter, a gay movie star biding his time between film projects in a Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He arrives at the New York loft apartment of Kelly (an apprehensive Erin Joy Schmidt), the therapist widow of his Harvard-educated twin brother, Craig, who felt compelled to join the army and go to Iraq, where he died in an armament mishap. Or was it suicide? And why is Kelly acting so uncomfortably around Peter, whom she has avoided seeing since her husband’s death?
There are enough unanswered by questions in Dying City to keep us leaning in, straining to crack its code, to solve its enigmas. And at Mosaic, it is performed so ably that watching the two actors is often satisfying enough. Schmidt is the anchor of the production, the character through whose eyes we experience events unfolding, in its back-and-forth chronology – from Peter’s arrival and then back a year earlier to the eve of Craig’s going off to war.
Schmidt only plays one character, but the divergent moods she conveys on those two fateful days offer her the opportunity to show quite an emotional range. As for Waugh, his delineation of the two brothers is quite crafty. He draws differences with subtlety, as well as sibling connections and similarities. Shinn can be a bit clunky with his structure, so that we soon know that when Peter ducks into a side room, it will be Craig who reemerges, and the play will have taken a time shift. Waugh’s performance goes a long way towards making it work.
The same could be said for Simon’s well-modulated direction and the lighting transitions by Dan Gelbmann. Shinn is only in his early 30s, so he may be providing us with edgy dramas for a long time to come. If they can be as affecting as Dying City, he may bring some new life to the theater.
DYING CITY, Mosaic Theatre, American Heritage School, 12200 W. Broward Blvd., Plantation. Continuing through May 9. Tickets: $37. Call: (954) 577-8243.