The Particulars

The Bridge Theatre Company is a troupe devoted to producing new works of Canadian theater in New York City, and Matthew MacKenzie’s The Particulars is the latest Northern light it has imported to shine at the Fringe. For better or worse, the piece’s style fits right in with local dramatic trends in magical-whimsical realism. In the first of its two monologues, Ashlie Atkinson plays an excitable youth minister delivering a sermon about her recent trip to the Congolese jungle in search of a missing mentor; though Atkinson is appealing, MacKenzie’s tale of gorillas, poachers and tribal superstitions sounds more like writing than speech. The script’s short-story-ish qualities are even more pronounced in the Poe-esque second monologue, delivered in the third person by Brian Silliman as a tense, meticulous widower annoyed by mysterious noises in his house. The play’s two stories overlap only minimally, and their juxtaposition is perhaps intended to represent different approaches toward letting people go: opening versus closure. But their pairing feels a little ungainly; there is not enough material here to bridge the play’s two halves. (Visit our Fringe Festival page for more reviews, and fringenyc.org for more information.)—Adam Feldman