Windows

Reviewed by Devin Weil
Loft Ensemble
Through August 17

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Photo by JD Ramage

On the night that Mitch Rosander and Cory Pilawski’s one-act collection of vignettes was reviewed, its venue, the Loft theater, was as hot and steamy as the subject matter of the four works on display: intimate relationships.

Fittingly enough, the theater resides in a cement industrial loft building that houses many artists in the epicenter of the appropriately named Arts District. In this corner of Downtown, art is created as the lifeblood of the community — as fresh, palatable, and sustaining as baked baguettes are to the French in Paris.

Even on a humid, intermittently rainy night, audiences stumbled down to the concrete hot box to see some theater. After entering through some black velvet curtains, I collapsed in the last row of what seemed like reclaimed theater seats from a different, long lost era.

The set was laid out as a cozy home with a rocking chair, a couch, a bed, and (placed centrally on a platform) a dining table and chairs. Further decoration included hanging photo frames. And lastly, paying homage to the title, was a single, red-painted window frame upstage left – the all-access portal into the lives of multiple couples.

The characters in the vignettes, in pairings, give the audience a fleeting taste and texture of their relationships. The scenes move quickly, reeling the audience in and then releasing it back out, before we can get too invested or frustrated with any couple on their “dates.” (Rosander is credited as supervising director. Other directors are Cameron Benton, Tor Jenson Brown, April Morrow and Josh David Nuncio.)

Each scenario deals with familiar themes of domestic partnerships: the courtship chase, the honeymoon stage, the friend-with-benefits, the overworked housewife, the widow who misses her lost love, and the on-again-off-again relationship. The majority of the pairs are 20-year olds navigating the oversexed, over stimulated modern dating climate. An element that fuels each scene is the emotional turbulence that exudes various auras of anger, anxiety, happiness, or sadness. For each scene the audience acts as a voyeur, peering through the “window” of each pair’s home.

Each vignette seems to address the common thread of love — its beauties and its tragedies, from its early stages of attraction, mystery, the nervousness, the insecurity, the adventure of learning about someone new, the false love, the illusion, the secrets, the deception, the anger, foolish love, head-over-heels love, I-want-to-marry-you-and-live- with-you-forever love; and lastly, lost love — the old, dear companion that has passed and whom a lover dearly misses. With a balance of conflict and comedy, and thanks to the truthful performances, Windows captures the vulnerabilities and the wonders of the chemistry that binds us.

Loft Ensemble, 929 E. Second Street, Ste. 105, Dwntwn.; Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through August 17, loftensemble.org