Shake

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Shake

at Theatre of NOTE

Reviewed by Jennie Webb

August 04, 2010

Photo by Darrett Sanders

It's a fascinating exercise: a play constructed around a backward sort of hindsight that reveals in reverse. In Joshua Fardon's "Shake," receiving its world premiere, his characters travel backward through time for 12 months—beginning, or ending, on the soon-to-be-significant eve of Sept. 11. With Manhattan as a backdrop, the very able Fardon has built an intriguing deconstruction of events that, albeit problematic, is certainly compelling. A lot can happen in a year, whichever way you look at it.

When we first meet the play's central couple, they are about as far apart as any two people can be. The scattered, angry Peggy (Alina Phelan) and earnest Bill (Joe Egender) run across each other at a chance meeting; their efforts to connect are palpable. Phelan and Egender are solid, engaging performers, and we're eager to follow them and make sense of the clues in Fardon's clever, often very funny, dialogue. Troy Blendell is spot-on as the anxious executive looking for his wife (Bridgette Campbell), whom he refuses to believe died in the towers. The lovely Hiwa Bourne plays a mystery waiting to be unraveled. And what a payoff when we meet Julia, the acting teacher who could give lessons on torture to terrorists, in an absolute tour de force by Michelle Gardner. Nods also to the charming Alana Dietze and to Linda Graves, who negotiates tricky material with skill.

With smart staging on a simple set (Terence McFadden), director Kiff Scholl does an extraordinarily handy job helping us put together the pieces to track the implosion of Bill and Peggy's relationship, as well as guiding us through implausible twists and turns prompted by the play's other characters. But while "Shake" contains interesting ideas and graceful writing, what this inside study of destruction fails to do is make us invest in, or care about, the lives that have fallen apart. So, for all its thoughtful engineering, perhaps it lacks a solid foundation.

Presented by and at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.
July 30–Sept. 5. Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m. (323) 856-8611. www.theatreofnote.com.