Review - A Delicate Ship

Boy, it's been hard to get back in the groove after a week off.  Plus, I've been listening to the US Open, so it's hard to concentrate.  I'll try to buckle down.  Tennis Week was fantastic; there will be a blog post eventually.  But even before Tennis Week got underway, I was so happy to get an invite from a handsome chum to see Anna Ziegler's play A Delicate Ship.  I know Anna a bit and enjoy her work (I saw one of her earlier plays and liked it quite a lot) so I was excited to get a look at this new-ish piece (I believe it's been done regionally) Monday night.

A Delicate Ship begins with an attractive young couple, Sarah and Sam, sitting on a couch in front of a Christmas tree.  They're saying romantic and charming things to each other and all seems well.  Suddenly, there's a knock on the door.  Not a knock, really, but banging.  And the well-being is shaken.  In comes Nate, a childhood friend of Sarah's, who has come to see Sarah with an agenda of his own.  What ensues is an evening of love, loss, obsession, jealousy and regret (among other things).

So, at first it seems like this will be a standard sort of love triangle/relationship play, but A Delicate Ship is more than that.  Ziegler plays a lot with time in this play, so often, during a scene, the characters will step out and remind us that 'all this happened a long time ago' and will give us information about the past and/or the future that has a bearing on what's happening in the present.  It's all done really well, with strong dialogue and keen insight into these characters, who truly seem like people instead of mouthpieces or stereotypes.  And, like most good plays, the more specific the situations for these characters, the more universal the play seems.

photo credit: Jenny Anderson

Normally, I'm a bit impatient with relationship stories about privileged folk in their 30s: 'oh, where am I going, what am I doing, woe is me.'  Yeesh, shut up, I generally don't care.  But Ziegler really digs more deeply into these people, and alongside the playing with time and space, I found much to relate to during the show.  At one point, Sarah says something like "When you're 33 and not married and a woman, you've been alone a very long time."  I rolled my eyes and at first thought, gee, then I should just be dead at 51, but the terrific blending of the writing and the acting made me remember how I felt in my 30s and it touched something in me.  There were quite a few moments like that - the characters' uses of memory would trigger one in me and I would relate to something else.  One of the characters in the play lives almost entirely in his past and I have friends like that.  And whenever a character says "What if I hadn't opened that door?", my brain jolted with recognition.  I frequently replay moments of my life that were sad or badly handled and imagine a different outcome if I had just 'not opened that door.' 

Besides the playing with time, I also enjoyed the aspects of the vagaries of memory throughout (can we ever really trust memory?  Can memory truly be shared?), and also the heightened and often poetic language the characters would use in their speeches to the audience.  It opened our brains a bit before taking us back into the grittier drama of the here and now.  And there was a lot of drama.  I'll admit that right after seeing the play, I was of the opinion that one of the actors was WAY overdoing it.  There were too many quirks and jitters and hyperactive gestures for my taste.  But as I've been thinking about the play over the last couple days, I acknowledge that the actor's interpretation was entirely valid for this character, who was also wildly overplaying a part.  So even though that performance style may not have been exactly my cup of tea, I guess it did its job.

I was very engaged in this story and wondered how it would all come out.  Well, no, actually, one of the plot points was quite telegraphed throughout, but that doesn't mean it was necessarily a bad thing and that I didn't wonder how it would affect the other characters.  I will say that I was a tad disappointed that the play seemed to have at least two, if not three endings, and maybe the repetition got to be a bit much for me and lessened my emotional commitment to the end of the play.  Intellectually, I understand what Ziegler may have been going for, but for me, I lost my engagement with the too-neat bows the play seemed to be tying.  But maybe that was just me.

All in all, it was a lovely evening.  I enjoyed A Delicate Ship quite a lot.  It was also nice to catch up with my handsome chum, who I see all too infrequently.  And a tasty pomegranate margarita before a show is never a bad thing.  It was a terrific Monday late-summer evening.  Hopefully, I can get back into my groove soon...