With a cast of 26 undergraduates and a running time of over two and half hours, the Department of Dramatic Art’s production of the “Playing for Time Project: a Holocaust palimpsest,” is a large undertaking.
Directed by dramatic art professor Gregory Kable, the play presents its audience with stirring wartime scenes, but as a whole suffers from inconsistent staging choices and a plethora of poorly orchestrated sound effects.
Based on an Arthur Miller Script, “The Project” is a memory play.
The graffiti remains the backdrop throughout the historical drama and nicely melds modern estimations of the genocide with a depicted brutal actuality.
With only 12 plastic chairs and three dangling bare-bulbs keeping the show from being completely bare staged, many props — instruments — and stage devices — a train — are often mimed by actors.
At times these imaginary musical instruments loose their proper proportion in the hands of the actors and chess boards are able to stay perfectly balanced when crammed in box-cars riding rattling rails.
Snow falls at the beginning of the second act, but only in what seemed like an unintentionally contained area—the snow remains on stage for the entirety of the second half and is a prominent distraction.
When Fenelon and her fellow inmates enter Auschwitz, the staging is captivating. The female actresses abandon etiquette they are stripped and abused.
The use of flashing red and blue stage lights is titillating and heightens edged nerves as the women’s hair is shaved and skin is painfully tattooed.
As a leading lady, Mazzocchi keeps a solid composure during her many lines and portrays a solid, undefined leader, though moments requiring emotional vigor are underplayed.
Actresses Renee Jackson and Erika Edwards excel when their characters are on rebellious streaks, adding feistiness to their excessively victimized women.
As the camp’s maintenance man, Alessandra Salgueiro is strange but prophetic, limping about stage and speaking with mysticism.
Trite sounds of war never seem to cease throughout the production. Cannons pound as if from a John Wayne epic and as a whole the effects amount to the integrity of machine gun fire emanating from recorded popcorn popping.
Actors are not always properly placed in the well-designed lighting. When classical music is projected, the representative instruments on stage do not always match the loud speaker’s noises.
The department’s latest effort is a deliberate reexamination of Miller’s work, and leaves much to be desired in its decision to shift much of the piece’s original emphases.
In Kable’s hands, the play focuses more on historical specificities than the character relationships that one would expect in a Miller play.
The play drones on, drawing to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion.
2.5 of 5 stars
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