REVIEWS

7/21/06
LA Times (Critic's Choice)
Keeping a date with tragedy
By Charlotte Stoudt

Everyone remembers whom they were with — or wished to be with — on Sept. 11, 2001. In every sense, the day revealed those we wanted close to us, and those who were terrifyingly closer than we'd thought.

Playwright and "Lost" staffer Craig Wright locates his 9/ll parable, "Recent Tragic Events," with a dark and hopeful little joke: a blind date in Minneapolis on Sept. 12, 2001. Andrew (Nathan Brooks Burgess), an airport bookstore manager, has been set up with Waverly (Dawn Burgess), who does something meaningless in advertising but loves Trollope. He arrives at her apartment to find she's very pretty and very scared — her twin sister, Wendy, who lives in New York, has yet to check in.

The date turns ever more awkwardly on its head: Waverly's freaky musician neighbor, Ron (the engaging Drake Simpson), shows up and makes himself at home, trailing a mute, disheveled bedmate (Tara Orr). A slightly desperate camaraderie develops as the four wait for the phone to ring with reassuring news.

On Jeff McLaughlin's set of Waverly's apartment — call it middling IKEA — director Stuart Rogers deftly choreographs his Theatre Tribe ensemble's interactions, creating a fluid sense of the lived moment. The play's surface is all chatter and nerves: Waverly compulsively insisting "it's all good," stoner comedy from Ron, and philosophizing courtesy of Joyce Carol Oates, Waverly's great-aunt, who shows up in the form of a sock puppet (forgivable whimsy — this is, after all, a play about free will and destiny).

At first "Events" feels sitcom thin, dramatically inert; then you realize the play is really happening inside Andrew. In a heartbreaking performance by Brooks Burgess, Andrew turns out to be an unwitting postmodern Ancient Mariner, carrying a terrible story he didn't know mattered until meeting Waverly. In this odd romantic tragicomedy, Wright uses 9/ll to insist that even an act of terrorism, no matter how horrifying, doesn't let anyone off the hook.

Like the song says, the fundamental things apply: Andrew will have to take responsibility for changing Waverly's life, however inadvertently, however painfully.  And for Wright, that looks a lot like true love.

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7/24/06
Daily Variety
By Terry Morgan

Artistically this country is just beginning to process its feelings and observations about 9/11, a tentative situation in which each film or work of art is preceded by a flurry of discussions asking: Is it too soon? Thus Craig Wright's play, "Recent Tragic Events," an offbeat comedy/drama set on 9/12, by its very subject matter becomes audacious. It's not a message play, however; it's much subtler and funnier than that. North Hollywood's Theater Tribe delivers a top-notch production of the show, a Southern California premiere, with director Stuart Rogers eliciting rich perfs from a talented cast.

Blind dates are hard enough, but to have one on the day after 9/11 adds more tension than Andrew (Nathan Brooks Burgess) is comfortable with. His date, Waverly (Dawn Burgess) insists everything is OK and invites him into her apartment.

While Andrew waits for Waverly to get ready to go out, her neighbor Ron (Drake Simpson) comes over, which only serves to make Andrew more skittish. Worse, it turns out Waverly has a twin sister, Wendy, who lives in New York, and is waiting desperately to hear from her in the aftermath of the disaster. The group decides to stay in and drink, and then author Joyce Carol Oates (Tara Orr) shows up.

Theater Tribe is noted for the general excellence of its acting, and director Rogers maintains that standard by focusing on clarity of performance. While remaining naturalistic, the actors take the time to register each emotional shift, from momentary hesitations to bold proclamations, resulting in thoroughly believable characters.

Nathan Brooks Burgess is wonderfully nervous and sympathetic as Andrew, a nice guy in a difficult situation. Dawn Burgess is terrific as Waverly, whose facade of cheer disintegrates as the evening draws on, and her speech about being a twin and the possible consequences of Wendy being dead is devastatingly effective.

Simpson brings tremendous energy and comedic expertise to his perf as Ron, and his manic joy in a scene where he jinxes Andrew for a Coke is irresistible.

Orr, who plays the mostly silent and pants-less Nancy, also performs Oates -- as a sock puppet. She voices the character superbly, as an interested but slightly superior guest, and it's a coup de theater for both Wright and Orr that the most powerful speech in the play is delivered by a sock puppet, and it works.

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712/06
LA Weekly
SURVIVOR'S GUILT - 9/11 with a Laugh Track
By Steven Mikulan

Everyone knows where they were on 9/11, but who remembers the day after? If 9/11 was a wake-up call for Americans, then 9/12, in playwright Craig Wright’s work, Recent Tragic Events, was the day we all began to sleepwalk into an uncertain future. Currently in its Southern California premiere at Theater Tribe, Wright’s 2002 play begins with a prelude: A Stage Manager (Kyle Colerider-Krugh) makes the usual cell-phone requests of the audience, then flips a coin to determine whether the production will run according to a “heads” version or its “tails” alternate, with the differences between the two indicated during the performance by amplified tones.

The story starts as a dating comedy and evolves into an absurdist collision of neuroses, before it becomes a debate on the nature of free will. Andrew (Nathan Brooks Burgess), an airport-bookstore manager, arrives at a Minneapolis apartment building to pick up his blind date, ad executive Waverly Wilson (Dawn Burgess) — a young woman who spends a suspicious amount of time stalling Andrew while she makes and receives phone calls. Her frequent trips to the bedroom cause the sensitive Andrew, who wears running shoes with his brown-cord jacket, to become even more nervous. Before long, Waverly’s musician neighbor, Ron (Drake Simpson), ambles onto the scene, critiques the wine Andrew has brought Waverly and generally makes him feel like the nerd Andrew suspects he is.

Soon the reason behind Waverly’s phone calls is clear: Her twin sister, Wendy, who lives in New York, has not been heard from since the attacks on the World Trade Center. Waverly downplays the chances of Wendy’s being in the Twin Towers — after all, she didn’t work there. Joined by Ron’s near-catatonic girlfriend, Nancy (Tara Orr), the group decides to order pizza, down tequila shots and watch the TV’s video loop of the attacks, all the while waiting to hear from Waverly’s mother. Then, Andrew remembers, a woman he recently met in a New York bar may have been Wendy — and she may have been hired for a job at the World Trade Center.

The play now takes a decidedly bizarre turn, when Waverly’s great-aunt, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates (Orr again), joins the party with a case of Mexican beer. Without giving too many of the play’s surprises away, I’ll note that Oates’ visit provides a surreal detour but doesn’t derail the evening. During a booze-guzzling card game, Oates and Ron argue over chance, fate and free will, with Ron delivering his bleak opinion that the 9/11 attacks were to be expected: “Kick everybody’s ass for a hundred and fifty years; plant a bunch of people on the other side of the world in the middle of a land where nobody likes them, because you feel bad you didn’t do anything about the Holocaust until it was too late...; build a pair of ultrafucking tall buildings in the most... prominent city in the world... and then act surprised when something bad happens.”

Wright’s straightforward autopsy of suburban marriage, Orange Flower Water, was a hit this spring at the Little Victory Theater; Recent Tragic Events veers away from that earlier play’s couples-therapy realism and more toward fantasy — one chilled by the shadow of historical catastrophe.

“It feels like a weird dream,” Waverly tells Andrew early on, describing both this strange play and the benumbed senses of America immediately after 9/11. Recent Tragic Events is torn between the gravity of Wendy’s situation (and that of the country’s) and the goofy connections the blind daters make. Waverly and Andrew both love Anthony Trollope novels, and, in fact, Andrew is so spooked when he realizes that his home library is identical to Waverly’s own bookshelves that he momentarily flees her apartment. On the other hand, “Wave” has never read any of the Oates books on her shelves and relies on Andrew, who adores Oates’ work, to summarize each one before her great-aunt arrives. Added to this mix is Ron, a narcissistically laid-back dude clearly going nowhere, who finds synchronicity in every coincidence.

Wright’s imaginative play becomes all the more nervy when one considers that it was written shortly after 9/11 and premiered in Washington, D.C., weeks before the disaster’s one-year anniversary. He knows his characters and their reassuring vocabulary, a lexicon that allows them to articulate the pain and confusion of that time in typically American terms. “Do what you gotta do,” Ron encourages at every turn, an anesthetizing sentiment echoed by Waverly’s two mantras, “It’s all good” and “Excellent!” When Waverly considers that her sister is dead, she refers to the airline crashes as “the thing” — an amorphous label that throws the skyjackings and their terrible aftermath into a harmless, fuzzy focus.

Wright also shows a comfortable familiarity with the tics of 30-somethings, especially their competitive wine expertise, studied nonchalance and social opaqueness. Because of this, the play rolls along crisply and confidently. Still, Wright’s use of the Stage Manager at the play’s opening and end never rises above gimmickry — the theater equivalent of a movie shot from a first-person point of view. His script also trails off toward its conclusion, as though experiencing the onset of deep sedation and counting backward from 100 until curtain. And, ultimately, for all the rhetorical sparks that fly between Oates and Ron, Wright’s own view of the free-will arguments is never clarified, and we feel that even trying to follow the conversation is a waste of time.

Recent Tragic Events, however, may well be the one “9/11 play” that survives the ravages of time, and its glitches do not cripple the work as a thoughtful entertainment or undermine this production’s charms. Director Stuart Rogers has assembled a definitive version here, beginning with a cast that is almost scarily in tune with the play’s characters. As Waverly and Andrew, Nathan Brooks Burgess and Dawn Burgess create a believable chemistry between two people who desperately want to like each other but are being pushed apart by events — and, to an extent, by Ron, hilariously brought to life by Simpson in a performance that is neither over-the-top nor merely irritating. In a rather outré impersonation of Oates, Orr recites the novelist’s ideas while Orr’s other character, Nancy, hides behind a curtain of her own hair. (Though Nancy has very few lines, some of her actions speak louder than words.)

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6/22/06
Daily News: U-Entertainment
A Deft Way to Deal with 9/11 Aftermath
By Evan Henerson, Theater Critic

The 9/11 play as we know it has taken a turn for the indescribable. Attention should be paid.

The events of "Recent Tragic Events," winningly performed at NoHo's Theatre Tribe, center around an existential all-nighter in a Minnesota apartment on Sept. 12, 2001. The participants are an advertising executive, her bookstore manager blind date, a Kramerian neighbor and his zonked-out squeeze.

Making things even more cosmically delightful, playwright Craig Wright has made use of a red-herring stage manager, sound effects used for comic purposes, and author Joyce Carol Oates portrayed by a sock puppet and voiced by the bare-bottomed actress playing the aforementioned neighbor's girlfriend.

Crazy stuff, this, but powerful and affecting nonetheless. Director Stuart Rogers has, in effect, melded two plays together: a kooky first encounter between a man and woman who might be too well- matched and a painful meditation on freedom, free will and determinism. In the course of a single evening, the fate of a character we never meet becomes vitally important to our heroine, her date and — by extension — to us.

Rogers and his deft ensemble work Wright's grab bag with real skill. It can be no easy prospect working "Tragic Events' " humor and tonal shifts, but the Tribe is on sure ground.

Things start innocently enough. Andrew (played by Nathan Brooks Burgess) arrives, twitchy and anxious, at the apartment (open, expansive and quite tastefully designed by Jeff McLaughlin) of Waverly (Dawn Burgess). This is a first date, and Andrew is early, meaning Waverly needs some time to dress and dry her hair. A perusal at the books on Waverly's shelf is enough to temporarily send a panicked Andrew fleeing from the apartment. And he gets locked out.

Let's back up a second. Before Andrew and Waverly meet, stage manager Kyle Colerider-Krugh has asked an audience member to flip a coin, and informed us that the heads or tails result dictates the play's sequence of events. A soft beep — heard periodically — signals something that might have changed had the coin landed differently. Which makes for some mindbending contemplation when you get a series of staccato beeps during the discussion of pizza toppings.

Back to the play. Before Andrew and Waverly can actually go on their date, the apartment is invaded by Waverly's best bud from down the hall, Ron (Drake Simpson). The news coverage churning out updates on Waverly's TV serves a vital purpose since Waverly's twin sister, Wendy, a New Yorker, has not been heard from since the towers fell. With the phone constantly ringing, a distracted Waverly decides she'd rather stay in. Andrew and Ron remain as well. The aforementioned guests (in the form of Tara Orr, actress and sock puppet wielder) arrive to complete the party.

The world may indeed be in crazy tragic flux, and one of the characters may — through sheer coincidence — possess some critical information. Inside Waverly's apartment, however, the beer flows, games are played and the discussion gets meaty.

Orr, so rag doll and glazed as Ron's girlfriend Nancy, is whip smart and insightful as the voice of Oates (hiding behind her own hair, she brings off the ventriloquism splendidly). Oates' philosophical tete a tete with Simpson's Ron is a thing of beauty, as is the sensitivity with which she has to fend off the questions of an adoring Andrew (she's his favorite author, after all).

Equally deft is the interplay between shy and conflicted Andrew and brittle, circumstance-crossed Waverly. Dawn and Nathan Burgess (husband and wife off stage) lock into who these characters are, beautifully negotiating the start of a relationship that could develop into something deep and substantial or something that might fall apart before it even gets started.

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6/6/06
BackStage West
By Madeleine Shaner

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