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Published on 7/4/08
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After a century of marriage to her less-than-better half, former ballerina Katja (Hudson) still has a bone to pick with her man. As the entertainment for their titular anniversary celebration, at which the audience members are the guests, she and her husband shed their shabby nursing-home garb to become their younger selves and reenact the events that led up to their current marital state (which is, not surprisingly, more piss than bliss). In Jesse Weaver’s syncopated, esoteric deconstruction of the perils of lifelong couplehood—call it Albee There for You —the playwright again proves himself a sure hand at crafting dazzling language and even manages to incorporate a certain flitting whimsy without grating the nerves.
But at the end of his new one-act, it’s still not clear what Weaver is after. There’s sound and fury in Hawkins’s handsomely gaudy production. As he did with Hatfield & McCoy, this well-regarded fight choreographer again demonstrates that he can do more than just fake a punch. But a series of loose metaphors—vials of poison, a naked hanging lightbulb, a trunk full of shrunken heads—doesn’t quite add up to anything cohesive, or even resonant.
It’s impossible not to be engaged by performance artist Hudson, an articulate torrent in a tutu. And Smith, as her husband, and Crocker, as their forcedly cheery daughter who narrates the reenactment, give firm support. But while it’s true that romantic commitment is a strange animal, and Weaver has written a play to match the strangeness, we leave more baffled than curious.
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