Off-Off-Broadway Review: “The Pool Plays” at the New Ohio Theater
The Pool, an artist-led pop-up theater company producing three ambitious new plays in rep, electrifies at The New Ohio Theater downtown. Catch them one at a time or settle in for a three-show day doozy; individually and collectively, this year’s cycle of Pool Plays is sure to linger long on the mind, coating the audience in a sickly-sweet malaise wrapped in deceptively charming premises.
“Superstitions” by Emily Zemba explores the titular theme through day-to-day interactions between nameless strangers milling about their lives, questioning if something bigger is out there for or against them. Zemba’s writing is succinct and adds a punchy coloring to the various interactions, painting a horror-twinged “Love Actually,” a cosmic-tinted web of connections vacillating between endearing and eerie.
The nondescript unit set of shelves looms over the ensemble much like their own personal demons. The stellar ensemble embodies the weight of their individual searches for purpose by moving deftly around scenes with alternate bouts of humor and gravitas. Looking up, looking down, looking away, awake or asleep, the characters are hauntingly mesmerizing while we’re helpless to watch them flit about with their own indecisions and beliefs. Masha Tsimring and Tuçe Yasak’s neon lighting design during scene transitions snaps us out of complacency, illuminating highly choreographed, almost mechanical transition blocking where everyone has a clear place and purpose— a poetically striking contrast to the characters’ meandering natures. “Superstitions” grapples with big questions with a witty intrigue that will ultimately leave you breathless: What do we surrender to? What do we succumb to? What shapes are there hiding when we close our eyes? What beliefs leave us buoyed— or suffocated?
Next up, Brenda Withers’ “Ding Dongs” is the oddball of the play trio, a deceptively realist portrait of two unexpected visitors to a normal suburban home, where nothing quite ends up the way it appears. As the visitors, Withers and Jonathan Fielding are masterful in their slow shedding of neighborly veneer; warm smiles melt to heated desperation as the true unease of the situation unfolds. Opposite them, Robert Kropf plays the unassuming homeowner with the wry weariness of a sitcom straightman, the audience’s sort of proxy while we are jointly in the dark with him as our collective nervous chuckles turn into muted horror. Daisy Walker’s direction expertly complements the play’s sneaking, menacing tone, with constant shifting and pacing driving our neighborhood trio in literal circles of conversation and staging. Unfortunately the cyclical nature of the play’s conversation, staging, and thematic premises trap us too long with dizzying expounding on events told not seen, ultimately leaving us lukewarm to the situation’s passivity. As the play and weirdness progress, however, a standout design is in Masha Tsimring and Tuçe Yasak’s lighting that warms and dilates your vision, creating a sick feeling of being accustomed to the situation the longer we’re in it with the characters. The decisive discomfort of “Ding Dongs” overall creates a longing for a way out that we (spoiler) never get.
By far one of the most exhilarating new plays I’ve seen in the last few years, Kate Cortesi’s “Is Edward Snowden Single?” invites the audience into two girls’ exuberant staging of some formative recent travails in their friendship. Playing a dozen or so characters seamlessly, Rebecca S'manga Frank and Elise Kibler are a revelation in heartbreak and realism, excavating beyond common young adult tropes to hit on a deeply authentic resonance around the complexities of best friendship. A marathon of witticisms and fresh vivacity, Cortesi’s writing possesses all the qualities of the best adolescent sleepovers: an earnest, fast-paced jitteriness sprinkled with those casual, piercingly honest conversations that (unbeknownst in the moment) you’ll end up holding onto as time, and your perception and formation of self-identity, move forward.
“Snowden” succeeds as a modern, tongue-in-cheek Bildungsroman, elevating a female voice and experience while we watch events unfold through the characters’ sometimes flawed points of view. This “flaw,” however, is just that the girls are human, growing and learning about themselves and their world’s manipulation, cruelty, or indifference around them. It’s a privilege to watch this play unfold within this unreliable narrator context though, as I found it refreshingly validating of a young person’s perspective with zero pretense or judgement thrust upon it. Cortesi has a gift of elucidating the cacophony of formative experiences that, when piled together, weave the narrative you tell yourself— and others— about your identity for possibly the rest of your life. Shedding a spotlight on this one snippet of these girls’ minds leaves you wanting more, as the world-building and irreverent tone of this play is so profoundly enjoyable I wanted to binge more seasons (so to speak). This is a play that hopefully has a long, long licensing life down the road, providing a challenging but fun small ensemble tour de force.
I don’t know if Edward Snowden is single, but I was certainly happily married to my evening with the Pool Plays.
“THE POOL PLAYS”
“The Pool Plays” are at the New Ohio Theater until November 20. For more tickets and information please visit https://www.thepoolplays.org/ or https://newohiotheatre.org/.
Producer: Victor Cervantes Jr. Scenography design by Masha Tsimring & Tuçe Yasak with lighting design for "Is Edward Snowden Single?" by Vickie Scott, sound design by Brian Hickey, costume design by Riw Rakkulchon, and props design by Vinny Mraz.
“Superstitions” by Emily Zemba. Directed by Jenna Worsham. Featuring: Celeste Arias, Latoya Edwards, Nicholas Gorham, David Greenspan, Iliana Guibert, Rebecca Jimenez, Ricardo Vázquez, and Naren Weiss.
“The Dings Dongs” by Brenda Withers. Directed by Daisy Walker. Featuring: Jonathan Fielding, Robert Kropf, and Brenda Withers.
“Is Edward Snowden Single?” by Kate Cortesi. Directed by Kate Bergstrom. Featuring: Rebecca S’Manga Frank, Elise Kibler, and Brian Miskell.
Photo of Rebecca S'manga Frank and Elise Kibler by Isaak Berliner from “Is Edward Snowden Single?”