Dear fellow human beings; fellow breathers –
Currently playing at DalekoArts is an off-beat and heartrending play called Middletown by Will Eno. Hard to define in certain terms, I will often describe it to people as “Our Town for the 21st Century”, even though I know that that doesn’t nearly complete the picture.
While both plays tell their stories though a “slice of life” framework – depicting real people in a real community – showing life as it is now, Middletown delves so much more into the subtle and truly undefinable moments of human interaction. Characters will converse and say nonsensical things, yet understand. Characters will mumble and murmur and mouth whole lines that manage to leave the audience scratching their heads yet nodding at the same time. Some scenes take place in outer space and some scenes take place in a household kitchen. Babies are born and people die. Eno’s point in all this is to show Life through every angle he can, with every literary technique at his disposal.
What you end up watching then is a two act play that manages to charm and knock your emotional socks off by the final blackout.
Even I as the assistant director, who’s probably seen the play about thirty times, never tired from the language and the actors speaking it. Therein lies the mastery of the playwright’s talents. Will Eno is really good at what he does! Despite being a late-bloomer to playwriting, he had run in with literary art in 1996 when he was invited to tune his fiction capabilities at an Edward F. Albee Foundation workshop in Montauk, Long Island. His first commercial success in New York was Thom Pain (based on nothing) in 2005. Citing Samuel Beckett as a huge inspiration, the play is a one-person monologue about trials and tribulations of life. Charles Isherwood, in his New York Times review, says it best:
Mr. Eno’s voice is so assuredly his own, simultaneously delicate and audacious in its measurements of poetry, philosophy and Monty Pythonesque silliness, that he should be allowed to speak for himself, in full.
Thom Pain went on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (bested by John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt) and another well-known play of his is The Realistic Joneses.
As for our production at DalekoArts, director Anne M. Byrd and the team has struck upon Eno’s trademark philosophy and silliness. I’m certainly happy to return to New Prague after a couple stints as an actor (Wait Until Dark and Snowed Inn), and can’t wait for audiences to laugh, cry and scratch their heads this time around.
VINCENT HANNAM 