Don’t attend The
Puzzle Locker, at the University of Rochester’s Todd Theatre, seeking
answers, it won’t provide any. Don’t attend expecting a linear plotline
involving the traditional exposition, climax, and resolution. This is
avant-garde theatre. So, seek questions, because you will leave with many. Seek
an original experience: It will be delivered.
An unnatural campground and a twisted school for exceptional
children are the setting for a plot that swerves back and forth between reality
and an unknown dimension. The living and the dead co-exist in this earthbound
purgatory and battle through their struggles with death, hope, poetry, nature,
and memory.
Noted playwright W. David Hancock worked with the cast to
write characters tailored to the actors. The intimate development process is
evident, as all the actors beautifully and disturbingly portray their
characters. Priest, Squirrel, Vampire Girl, Soccer Mom, Superhero Girl, and
Sasquatch (yes, Bigfoot) are a few of the demented that haunt this play. An
exceptional performance by Annie Herzog as Campfire Girl touches the audience
with a startling combination of innocence, lost hope, and desperation. Stepping
directly out of an urban legend, Katie McManus as the dead Cheerleader is
eerie.
Black soil, dry leaves, and a broken tree stump transform
the theatre into a foreboding campground. In contrast, the pale blue paint and
children’s art that decorates the classroom’s wall is inexplicably
nerve-wracking. The audience leaves the theater literally having ingested and
inhaled the grit of this other world. The sound, light, and video designs are
innovative, affective, and shocking.
Director Nigel Maister effectively navigates Hancock’s
surreality, guiding the creation of a thought-provoking production. His
blocking has the actors employing every inch of the theater’s space as they
climb through windows, over a fireplace, and under beds and boxes. But the pace
drags. There is only so long that an audience can pay attention to what they
don’t understand. Hancock could have communicated the same confused, intriguing
messages and eliminated the second act. The audience is lost in this
superfluous act as Hancock tries to lighten the established dark, cold mood
with failed comedy.
“Certainty can destroy you,” the park ranger insists to the
psychic girl. Have no fear of imminent destruction: You will leave the theater
confused, but charged with the questions The
Puzzle Locker inspires.
The University of Rochester International Theatre Program’s
production of The Puzzle Locker is on stage Wednesday through Saturday,
April 27 through 30, in the Todd Theatre, UR River Campus, at 8 p.m. (Sun 3
p.m.) $10. www.rochester.edu/theatre, 275-4088
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.
