Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

          If you were a caretaker for an elderly man, you were far from rolling in wealth and said elderly man randomly meets his demise in the bathroom during your shift, what would you do“  Call the police, mourn and reminisce about the good old days, right?  Not the two characters in Marie Jones’s direct-from-Ireland comedy called Fly Me to the Moon, which boasts an appealing premise but is largely a mild and uneven affair.

          The play begins on a subtle yet very funny note: Frances (Katie Tumelty) tidies a bedroom, casually and calmly, while singing along to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” on her iPod.  She gets the words we all know (“If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it”) and brilliantly mumbles most of the rest.  No moment to follow matches the simple and relatable Blasé-Working-Class energy depicted in this opening.  When Katie’s co-worker Loretta (Tara Lynne O’Neill) arrives, Moon enters a drawn out setup in which Jones tries to get us acquainted with the women.  When the main event finally occurs -- the discovery of Davy, the old man, dead in the bathroom -- instead of a stimulating assessment of how two regular folks react in the face of an extraordinary situation, there is forced comedy.

         In the actors’ defense, Frances and Loretta are not sharply drawn.  Numerous reactions seem arbitrary, as if their lines were devised via the playwright throwing a dart at a board listing Random Emotions.  For example, Tumelty’s Frances is the first to freak out over the dead body (“I’m not going in there!!”) but O’Neill’s Loretta is introduced as the more neurotic character up until this point.

         For a play like this to work, there needs to be more differences between the two characters so we can root for their types in such a high-stress situation.  That’s what makes something like The Odd Couple fly: the tension between Liberal/Conservative, Clean/Neat, Straight/Whacky.  Here the characters are inconsistent yet not three-dimensional, which makes it difficult to care about their journey.

           Act One features Loretta and Frances posing plans to steal money and keep the old man’s death a secret for “X” amount of time.  There is a sort-of attempt to have us feel pity for them because “Hey! The government owes us, right?!?!”  This attempt (complete with tears and a BFF fight) feels manipulative.  Are we supposed to feel sorry for these women after the playwright has so adamantly ventured down Comedy Road? - a zinger is even made about selling Devi’s wheelchair for money.  Are we meant to think that they must steal because they’re down-and-out caretakers, a job that they willingly chose?  This shift from comic morality tale to dramatic pain-and-suffering/let’s-complain/f*ck-the-government tale is awkward.

         Some tension returns in Act Two, but it only goes so far.  There’s a telemarketer who calls and a front door buzzer that rings, very nice touches in Jones’s script to shake things up.  But when the actors don’t have an explosive reaction to the telemarketer and when we find out who’s buzzing at the door, that tension is squandered.  In other words, this ‘dangerous’ situation is never as dangerous as us in the audience want it to be – especially when a twist arrives twenty minutes before the show ends that is an obvious, easy way out of the stakes.

          Niall Rea’s set is tight and constrained, sometimes evoking too much claustrophobia.  Seeing how these gals crack in their lives outside of this room -- keeping such a secret amongst their family and friends -- would have been more compelling.  As it stands, Marie Jones is on to something with this What-Would-You-Do plot, but script and the performances could use some tightening.