Claude
Brilliant Traces Cindy Lou Johnson Playwright

Brilliant traces cindy lou johnson script

By Cindy Lou Johnson. Directed by Hannu Huuskonen. A Vertigo Theatre and TAO Productions copresentation.

Red Sage Productions presents Brilliant Traces by Cindy Lou Johnson, directed by Kiff Scholl at The Lounge Theater through February 10, 2019.

If you should attend the Vestige Group production of Cindy Lou Johnson's Brilliant Traces, go for the performances. Jen Brown initially plays Rosannah as loud, panicked, and delirious, and that.
Brilliant Traces by Cindy Lou Johnson at The Lounge 2 Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles.
In the Playbill for Cindy Lou Johnson's 'Brilliant Traces' at the Cherry Lane Theater, there is a poem titled 'Individuation': If I must be wrung through the paradox, -broken into.

Claude

At the Firehall Arts Centre until Saturday, October 2

There should have been more people there. I was part of an excruciatingly tiny opening-night audience, and this production--especially Reno Dikaios's performance--deserves better.

Granted, Cindy Lou Johnson's script depends on a structure so overused that they must be teaching it in Playwriting 101: confine strangers in an unusual location and sit back while they strip away one another's defences, exposing painful vulnerabilities until they sink into a puddle of humanity-embracing love. Think Breakfast Club. To her credit, Johnson ups the entertainment value of this creaky format by layering on extremity and surreal humour; when the darkness of her text plays against its light, Brilliant Traces can be both bleakly funny and stealthily moving.

In Johnson's story, a woman named Rosannah Deluce bursts through the door of hermit Henry Harry's cabin in Alaska. It's the middle of a whiteout, and Rosannah is wearing only a wedding dress and satin shoes. We soon find out that she has been driving compulsively, fuelled by Mars bars, since she backed out of her nuptials in Arizona. Taciturn Henry has his own traumatic tale to share, albeit one with a major logical hole in the middle.

Dikaios's portrait of Rosannah is unsettling, which is mostly a good thing. She makes the character's near madness credible without losing sight of its comic potential. When this Rosannah talks about how she feared that she would start moving faster than her automobile and hurtle through its windshield, it's downright spooky. And her little exhalations and fidgety evasive tactics are successfully clownlike. There's probably a bit too much misery in the mix, but except when director Hannu Huuskonen allows Dikaios to go over the top, her line delivery feels impressively fresh and honest.

Brilliant traces cindy lou johnson script

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Tracey Olson's Henry. Olson can be a charmingly urbane actor, but that's hardly what's called for here; Henry is a cook on an oil rig who sees as little of other people as possible. Although Olson's performance is competent, he never really gets under Henry's skin, and with only two actors on-stage, that superficiality is a big problem.

I dislike Huuskonen's choice to have the characters act out events as they remember them. His expressionist lighting design undercuts the naturalism necessary to make the extreme situation feel as absurd as it should. And his musical selections for the scene breaks are disorientingly chirpy. Set designers Gary and Lynda Chu have given Henry an awfully large and hard-to-heat Alaskan cabin. And there's no way that Rosannah, who feared frostbite, would be wandering around with her bare feet on that Northern floor.

Many elements, large and small, are problematic. But Dikaios's work is not. She's worth seeing.

Brilliant Traces Cindy Lou Johnson Playwright