No

by AJ Sage

Review by Bryan VanCampen

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Lots of good things happened last night at the premiere of the first Ithaca Fringe Festival for new theater. I only wish I could have switched the order I saw the shows in, so I could have gone home with the Looney Tunes high I got from David Guaspari’s “Four Easy Pieces” as opposed to driving home after A.J. Sage’s “No” feeling like every asshole male I’ve always tried never to emulate.

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“No”, a real-time catastrophe that starts with a wedding proposal, is harrowing stuff about boundaries, relationships and the abuse that accrues. Despite the high wire gambit of opening the play with Nathan McNeill Murphy popping the question to Ali Diemecke, the bane of the play is the first five awkward minutes of “Well” and “But…” If it’s meant to be stylized awkward, the elliptical stuff doesn’t sound natural; it’s the lines the actors have to spend most of their time sounding natural; once Diemecke starts talking about her disastrous shift waiting tables, the play starts to ramp up.

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I also think that the two actors are mismatched; she’s fine, but he’s a little stiff and the chemistry isn’t quite right to me, despite what the play’s intent might be. Once the play deploys its biggest surprise reveal, the instinct seems to be to rush the piece to a conclusion. What if the reveal was the first line of the play? With some restructuring and elimination of unnecessary verbiage, “No” can be whittled down to an even more powerful truth. Like the Fringe Fest, it’s a good start.

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-Bryan VanCampen, 4/25/14