The second half of the play is one long, continuous scene, booby-trapped with surprises. We are now firmly rooted in a specific moment - a memorial service, though it’s not clear whose - and in a new genre. Wohl moves into dramatic overdrive without stripping gears. Somehow Ryan Foust (Chris), Maren Heary (Kate), Casey Hilton (Addie) and Harrison Fox (Carl) are both adorable and terrifying.Īnd then, in a beautifully managed effect, they disappear 32 years elapse and Ms. PHOTOS OF ACTRESS SUSANNAH FLOOD HOW TOShe has come close to the heart of a truth about childhood: They know how to “play” others even if they can’t play themselves. Wohl has chosen not only to work with children but also to depend on them as expressive actors. How did he get them?ĭespite always being several steps behind the plot - a wonderful and rare feeling - we get to know the Conlees very well. When Chris shows up with a bag of groceries - ketchup, bacon, Twizzlers - they aren’t plastic. The children’s play isn’t idle or fantastical in fact, we gradually realize, at some point it stopped being play. I won’t spoil it except to say that what at first seems to be a nostalgic comedy of underparenting isn’t. The story they (and we) begin to put together from these messages isn’t pretty. But “Make Believe,” which opened on Thursday at Second Stage Theater, is no stunt, even if the production, directed by Michael Greif at the top of his form, is a slick machine, honing and angling every casual moment to support the concept. Happily, the toughest constraints often elicit the strongest workarounds, and that’s the case here. Fields one-liner: “Never work with animals or children.” For the first 40 of its 80 minutes, “ Make Believe” is nothing but children. So naturally she’s now written a play that flies in the face of a theatrical prohibition so basic it’s all but engraved in the classic W.C. More recently, with “Continuity,” she set out to layer incompatible genres - a Hollywood backstager and an eco-sermon - on the back of the title pun. (The story, quite magically, stayed aloft.) In “Small Mouth Sounds,” her breakthrough hit, she confined her characters to a silent retreat, depriving them of dialogue and thus eliminating one of the tentpoles of drama. The playwright Bess Wohl certainly likes to make things difficult for herself.
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