THE 1041C Theater Reviews

After having the privilege of seeing “A Free Man of Color,” my expectations for a play might have been raised. The performance of “A Doll’s House” that we saw at Baruch was obviously nothing compared to the wonderful staging of “A Free Man of Color,” and maybe I am being unfairly harsh in this critique, as the production of the former had nowhere near the time nor the means as did the latter. However, I still really disliked it. In my humble opinion, it was bad.

What annoyed me the most was the script-on-a-stand acting. It wasn’t even script-in-hand. When we saw “Medea” at the same venue, I was mostly unaffected by the actors’ referral to their scripts. That was just it. They referred to them, and did not rely on them. Even though they were reading from them, they embodied the characters they played and emphasized what needed to be emphasized without being corny. This was not the case with this production of “A Doll’s House”. The actors read directly from the scripts, and did not make appropriate physical gestures toward each other. They made rudimentary contact, touching arms and waving toward one another, but hardly ever spoke their lines to the face of their counterpart. It made the play on whole, unbelievable. The lines they spoke were very powerful, but under such sparse acting, they became meaningless. I was very disappointed.

Then, there was the acting itself. It was so melodramatic, I ended up laughing at what were supposed to be very intense scenes. To put it bluntly, it was campy. Beyond campy. The actors tried so hard to be “serious” and “worried” and “sad,” and in effect, they were unintentionally hilarious. If anything, the production did amuse me, so taking everything into account, it might not have been such a waste of time. However, I do not think that was what it meant to do.

If anything could save the production, it was the actual play. I did take something from it: a more thorough understanding of Henrik Ibsen’s writing. I can actually picture it being performed very well–just not by this cast.