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Untethered
Reviewed by Vanessa Cate
Mountain View Mausoleum
Through June 7
RECOMMENDED:
Offering “the finest in burial crypts, niches, and Westminster crypts”, Mountain View Mausoleum holds over 25,000 “internments.” Additionally, the building itself is an architectural beauty, built by Cecil Bryan in 1923 and offering staggering stained glass, murals, and other aesthetic pieces worth appreciation. It is through this mausoleum that the audience enters for Untethered.
Julia Edward’s new play, directed by Jen Bloom, begins in a pleasant little courtyard set up as a theater in the round, before being lead with the actors back through the mausoleum in Act 2.
Surrounded by the dead, in a space of stone and marble that echoes each footstep as though pin-pointing each moment of living, the words gain resonance – figuratively and literally. The immersive quality of the space itself adds context and texture which transforms and elevates the play into something altogether new. What results is an almost arcane artistic experience.
Ellie (Joy Osmanski) is plagued by vivid nightmares involving the death of her boyfriend Ari (Adam J. Smith). The fear of losing him prompts her to want to tie the knot. But clinical Ari questions love and doesn’t know how to handle Ellie’s growing mania, so he pulls away from her. In their disconnection, a desperate Ellie turns to Ari’s father, Abbott (Kevin McCorkle), who has some expertise in dreams and offers a strange solution to her problems. Ari meanwhile, retreating with his surfboard to the sea, is rescued from nearly drowning by an enchanting and beautiful young woman, Niko (Gabriella Rhodeen), and a new complication arises.
The cast, including Eli Weinberg as Young Abbot, is entirely exquisite, weaving in and out of each other’s experiences and entrancing the audience.
The play calls itself a “wacky love story”, but I don’t believe that tag-line gives it the credit and weight it deserves. A “love + death experience,” it is a meditation of life, love, fear, communication and impermanence. Despite time travel, the third eye, time knots, sea nymphs, and the fourth dimension, I found Edward’s writing unusually honest and piercing. Stephanie Zaletel’s choreography set to Steven Van Betten’s haunting musical compositions add even more of a dreamlike quality, resulting in what perhaps could be a spiritual experience.
Mountain View Mausoleum, 2300 North Marengo Ave.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m. (no perfs Memorial Day weekend or Sat. May 30; added perf Thurs. June 4, 8 p.m.); through June 7. (323) 960-1054, https://www.plays411.com/untethered
