Zip It, Gumshoe
A Killer Story is a strange case. It has the trappings of a hardboiled detective yarn, but instead of snappy dialogue what you have is competing, overlapping monologues that are less about the case in question than the idea of the case—or rather the idea of detective work in general. Our gumshoe’s not big on details. It’s a show at the Marsh Berkeley, a hub for solo theater pieces, but this one’s a play written for a cast of three, even if they all tell their separate versions of the same story as if they’re performing three solo shows at the same time.
That Scamp Scapin
If there’s one thing that drives me up the wall, it’s slapstick. I’m not talking about physical comedy onstage or onscreen—that stuff’s great, at least when done well. What I can’t stand is when slapstick happens in real life, when inanimate objects can’t commit to being inanimate and start falling and flying all over the place. When the world seems to be working at cross-purposes with you—or what Sartre called the “coefficient of adversity”—that’s when things get frustrating.
