Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Red Wheelbarrow Productions professes the mission to present “contemporary interpretations of old works, new original works, and recently published works.” In other words: any play ever written. It has become a tedious reality of New York theatre that mediocre contemporary plays are “revived” off-off-Broadway as showcases for the newly arrived young actors. These productions can redeem themselves if the actors are talented, but still the new plays abound, and many are better than the current offering from Red Wheelbarrow, 2005’s off-Broadway miss Manuscript by Paul Grellong.

The problem with Manuscript as a play is that no one grows, changes, or learns. The given circumstances change, but the characters do not. The secret scenario is a gimmick that drives the plot, which is clever yet pointlessly misogynistic. There is no payoff to the thriller-genre reversals. Director Kevin Bigger’s program notes explain that his generation has made a remarkable discovery: prep school educations are not the answer to the emotional void of the upper-middle-class. That’s fine, but this lesson is found in neither the play nor this production.

The upside of the evening is the excellence of the acting. Brady Kirchberg plays Chris, the rich kid who is not what he seems. Kirchberg is completely at home onstage and uses his natural charm to pitch-perfect effect in the slippery role. Theo Salter brings a surprising complexity to the mysterious David, the less-rich kid who longs for a writing career. Missy Hernadnez plays Elizabeth, the rich girl who might be David’s point of access to the publishing industry. Elizabeth is a strangely written role, so Hernandez is probably not to blame for her sometimes strange performance. She is captivating in spite of the material. The murky relationships are believable, and when they are not it’s because there is something the writer doesn’t want us to know.

The set by Ron Beach, Jr. and Adam Kruger is your basic box, which serves the play except when it forces the actors to upstage themselves. Every scenic element is painted gray, in an overt metaphorical implication that (as the program notes explain) “the world is no longer so black and white.” This design choice is not quite as stupid as it sounds, and even helps the actors pop into focus, as does Rob Scallan’s simple but ideal lighting design. Successfully lighting hyper-realism on an all-gray stage is a neat trick.

Once the play’s surprise is revealed, the denouement is endless, akin to the twenty-page plot explanations in the penultimate chapters of Agatha Christie or J.K. Rowling. Yet it turns out to be a black-and-white revenge scenario after all. Those pages of script would have been better employed to examine how all three characters have poorly used each other, but that bottom line is unexplored. The actors were exuberant at the curtain call, and they deserved to be proud of their performances. But the young playwrights in the audience were likely crumpling their programs in frustration.