My overall impression
WHY THEATRE? Because it lives. It breathes. It pulsates with the full-bloodedness of actual experience. Sterling case in point: “52 Pick Up”. I saw this patchwork portrait of troubled love on the last day of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, and it was one of the most vitally interesting stage experiments I’ve ever been privileged to witness. It’s not that it says startling new things about the course of romance, but rather that it says them in the nonlinear, searching way that we recall relationships and seek to process those memories. Each short scene of the play corresponds to a playing card, and an audience member shuffles the deck before each show. The two actors must then perform the scenes in the order of the disordered deck, guaranteeing that no two performances are ever the same. Not only does this demand an admirable discipline from the cast, it requires that they begin each successive scene from whatever position they ended the previous one. This adds a fascinating wrinkle absent from all other nonlinear narratives and even from some online experiments in hyperlinked storytelling where each web series component is fixed in the cultural amber of video. In this transfixing play, when a scene depicting relational strife grows directly from one of loving harmony instead of merely cutting to it, it blurs the temporal boundaries of life episodes in a manner similar to how one’s faulty memory cross-references its files of related events. Galvanized and unpredictable, this show’s creators can rightly say of their work what ‘Dr. Frankenstein’ said of his own crazy-quilt creation: “It’s alive! ALIVE!” Encore performance coming soon—and I plan to be there!
