LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 31, 2003
THEATER BEAT
The white noise of a broadcast breakdown can be unnerving or
soothing by turns. It is sometimes both at once in David Greig's 1999 play
"The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former
Soviet Union," in which every character is atomized and
communication-impaired, from a pair of superannuated Russian spacemen (Peter
Vance, Aaron Lyons) stranded in forgotten orbit to a mismatched middle-aged
Scottish couple, Vivienne (Jennifer Pennington) and Keith (Dietrich Smith).
In the first of a series of fateful associations with which Greig
tenuously binds together the play's tragically transient world of airport
lounges, hotels, strip clubs and suburban flats, Keith is having a joyless
affair with the displaced daughter (Anna Khaja) of one of the cosmonauts, and
Vivienne later befriends a French scientist (Benjamin Burdick) obsessed with
contacting an unidentified orbiting object. Guess who's in it?
Audiences will either find Greig's daisy chain of thematic motifs
precious, as if he's somehow cheating at poetic significance, or stunningly
perceptive, as characters with so much more in common than they know
persistently, heartbreakingly fail to connect.
Open Fist's intermittently brilliant but half-baked new production
fogs too many of these nuances. Director Stefan Novinski has ignored Greig's
directive to double-cast key roles--a crucial element, it would seem, of the
playwright's teasing parallel-realities conceit.
And apart from the cosmonaut's claustrophobic capsule (set by Eric
Hugunin) and a simple starlight effect (lighting by Dan Reed), the design is
perfunctory; we have only the play's uniformly strong performances--particularly
Pennington's circumspect Vivienne and Bjorn Johnson as a chilly-turned-needy
diplomat--to create the play's world. This is enough for us to connect with
Greig's unique voice, but there's heavy static on the line.
"The Cosmonaut's Last
Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union," Open Fist
Theatre Company, 1625 N. La Brea Ave. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7
p.m. Ends Nov. 22. $15 (Fri.-Sat.); Sundays, pay what you can. (323) 882-6912.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.