Curtain Call
What's the word
By Jay Weitz
Do not go to Available Light [Theatre]'s The Thugs by Adam Bock expecting Shakespearean eloquence. In fact, don't even go to The Thugs expecting more than a few dozen complete sentences.
What is so fascinating about The Thugs is how much it manages to achieve with such relatively little means. It presents the suggestive power of language even as it disintegrates in the spaces between one person's mouth and another person's ear.
Ostensibly, The Thugs is about an office full of legal temps in a building that may or may not be under siege by a murderer. Rumors spread about mysterious disappearances. Police interrupt the workday to interrogate random people. The office is a microcosm of Bush-Cheney era fear.
What's happening in a larger sense, however, is that these people are imposing a narrative on their fragmentary knowledge of their immediate world. The audience in turn imposes its own narrative on its equally fragmentary knowledge of what these characters barely manage to say to each other.
Available Light's ensemble, under the direction of Matt Slaybaugh, has a fairly good grasp of Bock's painstakingly deconstructed dialogue, equal parts Pinter, Mamet and Beckett.
Most of the characters in this office have been working together long enough to have established their own pecking order and conversational rhythms. They've also determined who can be trusted and who can't. A new temp, Chantel (Tamara Embrya Deshango) enters this closed world and tries to figure it all out, along with the audience.
What: "The Thugs"
When: Through October 6
Where: Columbus Dance Theatre, Downtown
Web: avltheatre.com
Diane (Eleni Papaleonardos) supervises and seems to have a good rapport with the sensitive Elaine (Vanessa Becker). Daphne (Jennifer Spillane) hates working but likes being at work, probably because she has to deal with her abusive boyfriend Joey (Ian Short) at home. There's also gossipy Bart (Drew Eberly), sullen and aloof Mary (Michelle Schroeder), and annoying Mercedes (Acacia Duncan).
Dave Wallingford's soundscape, from the steady rain outside to the increasingly ominous ding of the offstage elevator, works wonderfully with Ryan Osborn's lighting. And there's a certain choreography to all the paper shuffling and pen flourishing.
So don't go to The Thugs expecting oratory or even a tidy ending. But do go.
September 27th, 2007
Copyright ? 2007 Columbus Alive, Inc. All rights reserved.
