My overall impression
Tony Frankel, theatre critic with Stage and Cinema here. This is one instance where mention of performances and plot will serve no useful purpose to substantiate my opinion.
While playwright Gus Kreiger may be having a lexocological field-day with his new play Clutch Deity, his thesaurus-consulting word play becomes the undoing of his post-apocolyptic tale – for although we are smitten with how much fun he is having with the English language, the verbosity trumps story and character development.
Interestingly enough, I entered the theatre ONE MINUTE after the show began and spent the entire first act wondering how the author disseminated all of his exposition in that first minute. The style, at first, is decidedly theatre of the absurd (both Beckett and Stoppard come to mind); Kreiger is at his best with the creation of existential repartee. The style than jarringly shifts to a mock Elizabethan with a veneer of George Lucas, and it soon becomes apparent that the script is a labyrinthical journey down a rabbit hole of ideas, leaving his audience in the dizzying dark, even though the basic structure of a story lies buried beneath the explosion of words.
I suspect that some theatregoers may be so impressed with Kreiger’s assemblage of three-syllable words and verbiage, that they may not notice how challenged the actors are with the complicated language. The acting ranges from glorious to flat, largely due to the stylistic differences in the script.
I love the Porters of Hellsgate, but a project like this may have been overly-ambitious for the esteemed company. However, I recommend this production to any young practitioner of the theatre: you may feel alienated but never bored, and you will see a perfect example of a playwright who is too clever by half. Hopefully, budding playwrights will learn that the story must be crafted first, then you can have all the fun you want tweaking with the language.
