By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
Fans of mumblecore, that movie genre centering on nerdy young adults who have trouble saying anything, will feel right at home watching the stage play “The Four of Us” by Itamar Moses. This Berkeley, California, native could well become the Harold Pinter of mumblecore. Some chatterers online maintain the play is more than a little bit autobiographical.
The Rogue Theatre brightens our summer with a fine production performed by Matt Bowdren and John Shartzer as a couple of twenty-something writer-types remembering their past and imagining their future.
Language, in both style and structure, is at the heart of this play that projects far more than just the meaning of words. Pauses and phrasing, often in a musical sense, create the framework on which everything is hung. Within this language a world exists that can only be known to young people who are rooting their life-long identities in today’s pop culture crammed with digital devices.
Their innocence has not been tinged with rue. The current music and fashions are their nourishment. They have yet to hook the big love that will ultimately get away. There are no wounds for time to heal.
Madonna is ancient history. The Rolling Stones are so old they probably set down their music on stone tablets using a hammer and chisel.
The heroes of today’s generation breathe technology. Physical strength isn’t so important. Gender differences don’t matter. Recreational drugs don’t carry any moral stigma. Real life is for the ones clever enough to appreciate it.
No wonder today’s leading men are nerds. They are the grown up kids with outdated computer games and stacks of graphic novels under their beds. Their fantasies may have a film noir edge, but their reality is filled with…mumblecore. They don’t care about global warming or saving the world so much as they wonder if they will ever have a sex life.
Speaking precise thoughts in complete sentences is not a top priority, either.
Bowdren and Shartzer are brilliant in catching all the layers implied in the dialogue Moses has written to portray this life. As directed by Cynthia Meier, with assistance from Nic Adams, the two actors give performances so fresh and natural it feels like eavesdropping.
Although there is a linear story line, the episodes are shuffled out of sequence. Performed without an intermission, the disconnected experiences have a continual ebb and flow that will be always reshaping itself in your own memory as new information comes in about the friendship between these two. A 10-year friendship that becomes both a blessing and a curse.
Chronologically, Benjamin (Bowdren) and David (Shartzer) meet at a teen music camp when both are 17, playing keyboards and knowing when to push all the right buttons.
Then a few years later they spend some vacation time together in Prague. Finally, both are back in New York pursuing their careers. Benjamin is successful and David isn’t.
So “The Four of Us” begins at the end of this story arc, in a restaurant over drinks. Two guys who haven’t seen each other for awhile are just getting together to catch up. That’s when Ben the novelist casually announces he recently signed his first book deal.
“For how much?” asks David, the struggling playwright.
“Two million,” says Ben, in about the same tone you’d expect for “two dollars.”
This is the telescope through which we see the rest of the play; always mindful that no matter how well these two friends get along, this two million dollar book deal hangs over the thread of their friendship like the sword of Damocles.
One last note: Bowdren and Shartzer are also artists of improvisation. Before each performance this weekend they will do 15 minutes of improv, imagining they are 17-year-old Benjamin and David at that music camp, each with his own computer and keyboard, creating a song together. The performance I saw that they made up on the spot was pretty funny.
"The Four of Us” plays at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, to June 27. The musical pre-show begins 15 minutes before each performance.
All tickets are $24, with half-price tickets for those with valid student ID, on sale 15 minutes before curtain. Pay-what-you-will night is June 24. For details and reservations, 520-551-2053, or visit www.TheRogueTheatre.org
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