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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Those Wacky Duncans...,
By Greg (SEATTLE, WA, US) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pterodactyls - Acting Edition (Paperback)
Ah, pterodactyls... A fond memory from the 'Aids n' Incest' period of New York theatre in the late eighties and early nineties.I've been fortunate enough to see one production and work on a second production of this play and, even after all that focus and exposure, I really don't know what to say about it. The characters are distinct, yet incredibly forgettable. The plot is unique and equally dismissible. It may haunt you for an evening but probably not for much longer than that. It could be that the play is feeling its age and that watching a family of WASPs dissolve into themselves just ain't entertainment no-more. Or it could be that the blending of absurdism and brutal reality seen throughout does little more than undercut its own "message", if it can be said to have one. The play draws parallels with certain types of instabilities that are bred into upper-middle class society, but not strongly enough to really be an allegory. The metaphors are strong (he's digging up dinosaur bones because THE FAMILY'S GOING EXTINCT, GET IT??) but the characters and situations are so... divorced from reality it's hard to apply any lesson or derive any meaning from their destruction. It just feels like watching sick people die (both metaphorically and literally at times) and what's the fun in that? There's no lesson to be learned, no parallels to draw, just a few hours of un-romantic suffering. The characters are Hardly sympathetic: Emma and her fiance Tommy come dangerously close to being so as young people in over their heads but they have "WILL BE TRAGIC FIGURES" stamped so firmly on their foreheads and behave so off-putting sometimes that it's hard to stay connected to them. Arthur (the father) becomes, by the end, the most well-rounded character onstage: equally enjoyable and detestable and whose "absurd" behaviors feel more rooted in an inner struggle than the others. It's starting to sound like I disapprove of characters who behave strangely (boys who, say, wear a cocktail dress for the bulk of the play for no real reason), which is completely untrue. I disapprove of characters who behave strangely for no bloody reason or for reasons overly contrived to give the play a weird flavor & set up easy jokes. And I fully understand that the intent here is to blend realism and absurdism (an incredibly difficult thing to do) but the purpose of doing so is to exaggerate and point out the absurdities in the everyday or the casual cruelties we're all guilty of. Pterodactyls goes a bit beyond that and, for me, starts to have the faint odor of a play that's "being weird for the sake of being WEIRD!". Or, you know, for shock value. But that's being overly critical; this is not Red Light Winter or some other such "grunge" garbage. There's a real distinct voice at work here, and incredibly... let's say "well-rounded" or "interesting" characters. The tones are consistent (both of them, grim and funny-but-grim). And, above all else, this can be an INCREDIBLY funny play, despite the AIDS and casual rape. There's a real sense of comic timing throughout the group scenes and, if approached correctly, our main character Todd should have, and give us, a wry smile at all times. It's hard to get an audience to "root" for him, but he's an agent of casual destruction, neither benevolent nor maleficent, sort of like time itself. He does awful things not (just) because he's an awful person but because, well, it just happens that way. Sometimes animals die off and species fade into extinction. This is a difficult piece to put up, requiring an entire artistic team with emotional availability, vulnerability, comic timing and who understand dark humor. More conservative audiences will, without a doubt, run screaming from it. But if you've got the guts and access to the talent, this can be an incredibly rewarding piece about death, extinction and the suburbs.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dazzling and Witty,
This review is from: Pterodactyls - Acting Edition (Paperback)
Silver's great strength is his uncanny ability to say horrible (yet true!) things in a way that makes us laugh, sometimes at ourselves. His voice is mature, intelligent, and most importantly, relevant.
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