Do Not Disturb

Reviewed by Reza Vojdani

Playwright Joshua Fardon begins his program note stating “Any act of intimacy is a risk.” Each piece of ourselves we reveal to the world is an opportunity to be either loved or hurt. With this, Fardon opens up to us with his writing in Do Not Disturb, four plays directed by Kevin Hoffer at Theatre of Note.

“Blanks,” the first play, begins with a small get-together between two couples. The hosts, Pat (Tony DeCarlo) and Sandy (Kathy Deitch) open the scene by bantering about Pat’s mental block on his work as a cartoonist, while guests June (Jenny Gillett) and Bill (Travis York) make conversation despite underlying tension in their own relationship —  until Pat makes the guests a strange proposition. While the dialogue, and the play as a whole, never leave reality too far behind, the plot does little to convince the audience of any real relationship between the two couples that could justify the progression of events. Gillett and York lack a convincing chemistry portraying spouses, while DeCarlo and Deitch show little conviction and gravity that their characters’ desperation would seemingly warrant.

The second play, “Due Diligence,” opens in a similarly comfortable environment: Walter (David Bickford) is in the process of questioning his son’s soon-to-be fiancée Marilyn (Jenny Soo) about herself. Marilyn responds surprisingly bluntly to questioning, telling a personal secret that throws Walter off. This is followed by pseudo-psychological conversation on relationships. Again, it feels as if we are not given enough time to get a sense of who the characters are to justify their seemingly drastic actions: Though Fardon’s writing provides an interesting view on an administrative approach to love and relationships, the scene takes a strange turn when Walter and Marilyn’s relationship develops, with little justification, into something more intimate than that between a father and his daughter-in-law.

Upping the dramatic ante from its two predecessors, “Soon My Angel Came Again” opens on a young couple John (Kjai Block) and Mary (Channing Sargent) in a state of disarray when an Angel (Tricia Munford) appears in their apartment after John drinks the contents of an antique bottle he has found. The Angel continuously blurts out secrets the couple have kept from one another. With the Angel alluding to even darker secrets to be revealed, Mary takes more drastic action when alone with the Angel. The third play falters in a similar manner to the previous two by asking us to comprehend and rationalize characters’ unorthodox behavior with too-little background on the characters themselves. More so than in the other plays, the narrative progression of “Soon My Angel . . .” offers shock for the sake of shock rather than delving into its potentially interesting themes on the intersections of intimacy and privacy. 

The first three plays act almost as an opening set for the evening’s final play, “Rise,” which opens with Elizabeth (Chantelle Albers) at the apartment of Kevin (Troy Blendell), chatting with him as an old friend would. Kevin however has no idea who Elizabeth is or how she knows him. Elizabeth says she has been posting on Kevin’s Facebook wall daily for over four years about every facet of her life, yet Kevin has never actually checked his profile nor remembers any connection to her. Elizabeth presents herself as a wholesome Southern girl, a role Albers portrays notably well. Kevin is an agoraphobic, shut-in mathematician who has devoted his life, to his detriment, trying to solve a mathematical theory based on his own equation. Blendell’s performance is also convincing, chock full of nervous ticks and quirky behavior that keep us laughing when paired against Elizabeth’s outgoing character.

Contrasted against the other plays and much to its benefit, “Rise” moves at a slower, steadier pace. Elizabeth reveals she has solved Kevin’s equation through an epiphany she had after looking at Kevin’s profile picture. She muses on whether it is possible to truly know someone based on scattered personal details, thereby asking us to consider who we truly are — the person we consider ourselves to be, the person we wish we could be, the person we pretend to be?

Unfortunately, these interesting themes on identity are given only so much time to gestate before the play takes a turn down a wilder and stranger path. The intensity and pace of the play suddenly ratchet up, and the audience is forced to abandon the quirky yet believably realistic world for a more abstract setting, where our preconceived notions of the characters’ backgrounds are shattered. The audience is suddenly asked to grapple with themes such as gender, sexual assault, and spiritual fulfillment that had little or no presence for the play’s first two-thirds – as though Fardon had grown weary of his own comedic, thought-provoking world that he’d established with such artistry.

Fardon’s program note on intimacy provides a certain resonance to the plays and their characters. His dramatic technique is to deliver, in each play, an intriguing, off-kilter moment of intimacy, but that moment generally arrives too quickly and capriciously to leave much insight in its wake.