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| L-R: Austin Jones, John Garrett Greer, and Hardy Pinnell in SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME. |
Next In Line
Productions,
a relatively new theatrical troupe, has just launched its inaugural production –
an excellent revival of Someone Who’ll
Watch Over Me by Frank McGuinness. This
is a fine production of which any long established off off Broadway theatrical
company might well be proud and it is truly a remarkable accomplishment for
such a newly formed group.
Someone Who’ll Watch
Over Me
was first produced in London’s West End in 1992 and was subsequently staged on
Broadway where it ran for more than a year, receiving Tony Award nominations
for Best Play and Best Actor. It has
been successfully revived several times since, both in London and in the US,
and this latest revival - at the Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street in lower
Manhattan – is well worth seeing.
This
is the story of three men – an American, an Irishman, and an Englishman – who
have been kidnapped separately in Lebanon by unknown captors but who were all
brought to the same place and who now are all being held as prisoners in the
same room. In a way, reviving this play
today may seem especially timely, in light of events in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Gaza. And so it
is. But in a larger sense, the Middle
East today, while providing a backdrop for the play, is not really what this
play is all about. Rather, this is a
classic rendition of man’s indomitable spirit, in the face of the inevitable
despair he must feel in light of his own mortality and the incomprehensibility
(if not outright meaninglessness) of the world.
Thus, the play is not so much an international geopolitical narrative as
it is an existential exposition of man’s helplessness in the face of forces
beyond his control, coupled with his fortitude in confronting them, much in the
manner of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot or Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.
Someone Who’ll Watch
Over Me is
a three-hander, featuring John Garrett Greer as Adam Canning, Hardy Pinnell as
Edward Sheridan, and Austin Jones as Michael Watters. All three are not only convincing but
exceptionally accomplished in their respective roles: Greer is cool and
self-controlled as Adam, an American doctor; Pinnell is much more volatile and
belligerent as Edward, an Irish journalist; and Jones is effectively prissy and
mildly paranoid as Michael, an English professor who can’t even fully accept
that he is where he is. Through it all,
the three are chained to the walls of their prison (suggestive perhaps of
Plato’s allusion to man’s limited perception of the world as being based
erroneously only on the shadows cast on the walls of his cave rather than on
true reality), somewhat limiting their physical mobility but not their
imaginations.
And
so, in the course of the play, the three play games, sing, act out their
recollections of past events, compose letters that they know will never be
posted, imbibe imaginary drinks, pretend to direct and film movies, and force
themselves to laugh in the face of the horror confronting them, in sequences
that range from the inane to the insane, with the line between the two
increasingly blurred. It is, in its way,
theatre of the absurd or, as the characters themselves are wont to say:
“Ridiculous.”
The
final words in Samuel Beckett’s novel, The
Unnamable, actually may say it all: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
And so they do.
.
