You know a play’s up fake creek without a paddle when one character whips out a handgun to keep the other character from exiting stage left. That device is deployed more than once in the four short but not short enough plays that comprise Iraq in 3/3 Time With a Coda.
That could be my lede in a regular review. The second graph could say something about how Etcetera, Live Theatre Workshop’s late-night series, decided for unknown reasons to present local playwright Gavin Kayner’s excitable and stubbornly humorless declarations about war (he’s against it). He also directs.
But who I am kidding? There’s no way I’m going to review what I’m seeing right now. Who wants to be the mean old man with nothing better to do than slam the hard work of a serious-minded playwright and four actors who are probably kind and decent people? Not me.
Iraq is billed as four short “ruminations on the effects of war and violence.” Suffice it to say that lots of war-related words like IED and Humvee and Fallujah are being said as one play ends and another begins. It’s a good thing I had coffee next door before the show.
This guy on stage now: he’s doing his sarcastic face and saying so many words. It must be hard to remember so many words that are strung together with no connection to the way humans talk. Maybe he’s a savant.
He’s talking endlessly to a motionless man sitting with his back to us. That poor actor, still as a statue, must be miserable. Unlike him, at least we can shift uncomfortably in our seats. Maybe he’s supposed to be dead. I wish I was.
Now we’re in the third play and it’s droning on and on. The talky guy is getting all loud again, waving his gun and righteously huffing and puffing. Would it kill him to pass that gun? C’mon, dude. Huff, puff, pass.
Ooh, the talky guy is backstage taking a well-deserved rest. A young woman has taken his place and she’s talking about her dead dad. I like her eyes. She likes to think her dad jumped from the towers, his arms spread wide. Wait, so we’re doing Sept. 11 now?
Her dad liked baseball and she thinks about him when she goes to games.
Why didn’t God catch him? She asks the same question three times, so it must be a climax. Yes!
The show’s over. I have just passed through what was truly the longest hour of my life. We’re all clapping as hard as we can.
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2014.
While the topics in these short plays may not be to everyone’s taste, this “non-review” is just downright mean! If Skinner said he was not going to review the play, he should have left it at that. Instead, he went on a rampage, detailing his thoughts as the play progressed. The actor “saying so many words” as Skinner put it, was obviously reciting instructions from a sniper’s manual and pitting his own guilt against his indoctrination. The actors did a fair job, some better than others. Jared Stokes, in particular, performed his multiple roles convincingly. This is the nastiest “non-review” I’ve ever read. Me thinks there was a bad burrito consumed with that cup of coffee before the show.
Worst and most infantile ‘professional’ review I have ever read. This told me little or nothing constructive about the play, only that the ‘reviewer’, (I use the term loosely), did not like it, but gives no reason for his views. Methinks there may be more than just a bad burrito in the mix.
Just got around to reading the May 29th ‘review’ by M. Scott Skinner’s of “Iraq in 3/3 Time With A Coda”, which I had the good fortune to see at Live Theatre Workshop.
My husband and I just moved here from the North Shore of Boston, and one of the things that attracts us to Tucson is its wonderful theater community and the many theaters and the many new plays, innovative companies, writers groups, responsive audience, and more that exist here. We both hope to become a part of it.
One of the many things we’ve learned about theater and about new plays in particular is advice from the Chicago Dramatists group (which has done a phenomenal job of creating a dynamic theater culture in Chicago), and they feel that the Chicago theatrical renaissance owes much to the reviewers who went to all the plays, who supported the theaters and playwrights and actors through thick and thin, and gave public structure to the efforts of that artistic community. They built audience, and sensibility, and sensitivity, and confidence in what was once backwater Chicago. They did it.
This review is really not much of a help in building the community here in Tucson. It’s snarky, and about the critic and how clever and funny one can be, and not useful or constructive in any way. There was much to say about Iraq in 3/e Time With A Coda, and much good, and there are things that could be better, too, lessons that could be learned, but this review doesn’t try in any way to nurture the playwright, the actors, the theaters that make themselves available for new work, or the audience. It’s a turnoff.
It’s fine not to like a play. It’s fine not to like a production. But it is vicious to put together a review like this. And it does little good except to give a critic the chance to perform some sort of public execution.
I like playwright, I liked the risk he took to put the play on, to direct it himself, I like new plays, I like these actors who took up this challenge, I like people who take risks, I like people who go to plays who share their thoughts and reactions in the hope of making Tucson a greater center of theater.
I really don’t appreciate people who lurk outside the lights and look for signs of weakness to prove —what? I guess I don’t know what the point is.
Thank you to the playwright, the actors, and Live Theatre Workshop for putting up new plays. I hope to see more.
Leslie Powell
The Weekly will nurture every new band no matter the skill level. They also nurture one another with congratulatory comments about their opinions. There are thousands of people in Tucson interested in theatre and it is not always the most common or commercial. Mr. Skinner wrote a rave review of a commerical house company previously. Despite the digital age, theatres still count on positive press. I think this reviewers inability, for example, to discuss anything about the actress but her eyes is not only telling but a little creepy. My takeaway from this review was that the reviewer does not know how to look at a play or a performance. It may be the show was unsuccessful. I liked many things, other things bothered me. The theatre community depends on places like the Weekly to deliver arts news and it is very disappointing that this is the result. Who will review the reviewrs? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?