There are two productions at the Festival of Independent Theaters of which you should steer clear: Second Thought’s Once More, With Feeling (A Power Play) and the McClarey Players’ Purgatory, A Bedroom Farce. Both feature young actors, including some with real talent, but the scripts are the real culprits. Christina Cigala’s Once More and Cliff McClelland’s Purgatory are both meandering and jokey. They’re painful to sit through.
At first, Once More is charming. The young cast is one of the most energetic and assured in the festival, and for a long time they are able to distract the audience away from the incoherent script. Matthew Clark is B, and Cara L. Reid is A. Sachin Patel is in drag as Chloe, Jason Robert Villarreal is Manny, and Tiffany Lonsdale-Hands plays the narrator. Each actor is dead-on in their roles, particularly Reid, and they seem to know exactly what they’re doing. I wonder if they sat down and talked with the playwright though, because Cigala’s script is a self-indulgent mess, full of in-jokes that no one could possibly understand.
Obviously a young playwright, Cigala is obsessed with her own decision to be a playwright, and her play is decidedly, drumroll please, meta. It’s a play within a play, as A (standing in for Cigala, narrated by Lonsdale-Hands — it’s confusing) tries to work through her feelings for her playwright ex-boyfriend B. There’s also a completely incomprehensible subplot with a woman named Chloe who’s talking to someone invisible on a couch. When it’s finally revealed who Chloe is and why she’s in the play, it turns out not to be worth the endless confusion her presence caused. Once More is also frequently crude and includes unnecessary prop comedy. At one point, A calls her own play “Woody Allen s***,” and she was half right. The show does manage to be well directed by Mac Lower, despite it all.
If Once More is “frequently” crude, Purgatory has obscenities in spades. It has more sexual “jokes” than any play I’ve ever seen. None of them are funny, and all of them are uncomfortable. The play is basically like Sartre’s No Exit set in Purgatory, and apparently McClelland based it on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but this is the flimsiest, shallowest interpretation of the afterlife I’ve ever seen.
Featuring Amanda Doskicil, Sean Murphy, and Dustin Sautter as three semi-condemned souls (a nymphomaniac, a compulsive masturbator, and a morbidly obese man), the one-act is played with such a lack of energy, it almost seems as though McLelland (who also directed it) gave his actors the note: “actually be dead. Remember, these people don’t have living souls anymore!”
The play reaches desperately for laughs, but it only manages to repulse. These are three utterly unlikable characters, and McClelland doesn’t manage to salvage any sympathy when he brings in Angela (Amber Nicole Guest), who is fairly normal. Guest plays her even deader than the rest, and her character’s climactic reversal is one of the strangest I’ve ever seen.
On top of it all, the play doesn’t end with an eye towards redemption, but rather seems to affirm its despicable, whiny characters’ despicable whines. It’s a bleak experience.
(Main Image: publicity photo for Once More, With Feeling)
