Aaron Riccio on Pretty Theft

(Photo: Isaiah Tanenbaum. Pictured: Marnie Schulenburg, Todd d’Amour)

Aaron Riccio’s review came out! He’s had us in suspense…but it’s worth the wait. I’m glad that he embraces the tonal dissonances in the play – the way Adam sets Allegra’s scene with her father against Bobby and Suzy in the movie theatre – as a central strength of the play.

I’m realizing that this juxtaposition of tonal/stylistic/emotional contrasts – similar to the Elizabethan way of throwing Dogberry and Beatrice into the same play – is a strong aesthetic value of Flux’s. The sparks of those contradictory things (provided they are driven by an underlying human need and not done merely for affect) stand at the heart of much of the work we’ve done – from Lyza’s ecstatic preaching undercut by GL with the axe in Riding the Bull, to Segismundo sharing a cell with Clarin in Life is a Dream, to Snake and Ernelle necking in the car waiting for Osley to commit his terrible act in Rattlers, to the antic realism of Pretty Theft exploding mid-way into frightening dreams before the hard landing in the hotel room; a core human impulse transformed from the ridiculous and mundane to the horrible and sublime and back; this transformative kind of theatre, because it still believes in narrative, character and catharsis is not called experimental, but feels endlessly surprising to me. We know what we are, but not what we may be…

Anyway, read the review, and then go get your tickets!