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Published on 7/23/08
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Dramatist is the not the hippest job around, but Ensemble Studio Theatre’s group Youngblood makes you forget that: Its writers play cool preshow music, they turn a clever phrase and know how to throw a party. The latest bash is this year’s Thicker than Water, a night of short plays with no particular organizing principle, except perhaps to celebrate outcasts and quirky losers—among whose ranks playwrights might count themselves.
There are lulls and duds in the program, but some engagingly funny shorts, too. Chief among these is Annie Baker’s light but affecting comedy Group, in which a miserable single mother (Catherine Curtin) and a callow dude (Lance Rubin) are apparently the only members of a writers’ group. Over a series of deftly scripted scenes, Baker explores the uses of art for healing wounds and making connections.
A close runner-up is Bike Wreck, Qui Nguyen’s jauntily violent urban tale about an African-American bike messenger (William Jackson Harper) and a Chinese deliveryman (Arthur Acuna), and how their paths tragicomically intersect with that of an arrogant businessman (Justin Reinsilber). Besides jokes about race, class and gentrification, Nguyen glosses the gritty pulp with hints of philosophical depth.
Between plays, Emily Conbere helps pass the time with The Jamal Lullabies, a song cycle in which actors play four high-school girls variously connected to a deceased schoolmate/boyfriend, whose drug dealing and sexual prowess they memorialize with rue and defiance. Like most of Thicker than Water’s offerings, it’s satisfying in small doses, but could conceivably be the basis of something bigger. — David Cote
