My overall impression
The play opens with a monologue by “The Administrator,” a sprightly office manager of purgatory (Rachel Grate), recounting Dido’s mythic story. The love-tortured Queen of Carthage, whose unrequited love from Aeneas drives her to self-immolation, installs the thematic concerns of the play, as The Administrator’s assistants (Maricella Ibarra, Marissa Moses and Sena Ramirez) cull through stacks of messages from the dead.
The play exists in transitional space, in a sort of bureaucratic love-purgatory, where the paradoxes and ironies of love materialize into beautiful and sad and funny scenes between characters whose cosmic longings converge into the humanly particular. There are the manic appetites of Charlie (Jim Senti), who obsessively wants Meredith (Mercedes Manning), a girlfriend from his youth who has her own longings for both the masochistic chaos of Charlie, and the gentle earnestness of J.W. (Jason Vande Brake), a boiler-room worker whose blue-collar lyricism in the end wins over Meredith. But she is torn. What this play does so well is exist in this stasis, a timeless space mixing eras and generations, where our desires damage ourselves and others in the name of love, wanting not just moribund-predictability or restless-excitement from a lover, but all of it. Characters such as Eunice (Sage Simpson), a Jazz Age dancer who moves and speaks authentically to ragtime, wants J.W. badly, but as she is spurned because of J.W.’s love for Meredith, she wants freedom from love’s tyranny, in the end simply sloughing this whole madness of love, but not without coaxing an authentic response to love from J.W., the contradicting rage that is so coalesced with tenderness. The love triangle rotates with precision between all of these characters resulting in shuddering laughter and tight-lipped tears.
The entire gang did a fantastic job, from the ethereal choreography (Marissa Moses), to the producing (Sena Ramirez), to the music (Aaron Beaumont), to the directing (Amanda McRaven), to the set, costume and lighting design (Jeanine Ringer, Rachel Stivers, Karyn Lawrence). And of course Meghan Brown’s writing is sharp, funny, and felt.
There was one moment when Charlie tries to explain his actions that had unwittingly hurt Meredith as “Just what humans do.” Tis where I lost my shit. The play enacts this type of human folly with humor, with exactitude, with love. The artists of THE FIRE ROOM take our small acts of love and transmute them into something eternal, worthy of the timeless setting and themes housing these characters. I left feeling as if I experienced the full scale of being human—like the characters, I felt elated and melancholy, excited and terrified of love’s possibility.
