Animals & Plants (CoHo Productions) Grade B

by Adam Rapp
Directed by Michael O'Connell

Cast:
Burris  .....   Christopher David Murray
Dantly  .....   Joe Bolenbaugh
Cassandra   .....   Nikki Weaver
Buck   .....   Jon Plueard

sez says:  my-oh-my..what is this all about?  Evolution I guess. The acting is top notch--esp Murray and Bolenbaugh, who both create amazing, believable, and rather shocking characters. (Drug Mules in a motel room waiting for their connection)  They are shocking not because they are particularly evil or bad people--but because they are so 'Un-evolved".  Their level of discourse, there ideas, their relationship...everything about them reeks of a kind of animal ignorance --but it is laced with a twinklings of wondering about the world and a yearning to be connected to the world in some way.   Are these characters "real" or just in the imagination of the playwright?   I suspect the former--and we (the average theater-going-audience)  have so little contact with people like this --in real life or in the theater--that we don't know how to respond, or what to think.  Theater should expose us to new ideas--and to new cultures--and to new characters--and maybe, most of all, to our own ignorance.  So I have to say good job..and I am still thinking about these guys

mjc says: the two characters are well made by the actors and the playwright, at least in my prejudiced stereotypes of the "uninformed" who see to dominate the discourse on right wing talk radio.  And, what more could you ask for in a play but well made characters who come and go and that's that.