Falling Asleep in The Rachel Brown Theatre

Her neck slowly and gracefully fell to her shoulder, until she twitched and caught it. Slowly she nodded off several times and finally succumbed to the peacefulness of a deep sleep in the Rachel Brown Theatre on January 14th.

This is a story of a woman sitting in front of me at the showing of 2010's edition and the 5th anniversary of "In the Chamber", a series by Theatre Projects Manitoba. I attended a play in the Theatre Projects' 20th season, with high hopes because most plays I go to I am pleasantly surprised with the outcome. But, not this time. This time I tried really hard not to fall asleep, like the woman in front of me, who failed terribly.

Gordon Tanner and Steven Ratzlaff performed two monologues with the same theme, mid-life crisis. I have to say, their acting was well done and I give credit to the two because they each performed monologues over 45 minutes long. They didn't stumble through their lines at all, or if they did I didn't notice. In my opinion it would be very hard to perform a monologue this long.

The problem I had with the play was how boring and dry the content was. I thought the idea for the central theme was well thought out, but not delivered. A very large group of people can relate with the theme, but I found it was pointed at a older audience. I haven't gone through mid-life crisis yet as I am 20 years old.

I still don't have the confidence to tell people what the play was about because I didn't fully understand what was going on half the time, and I was fighting my sleepy eyes.

This is what I got out of it:

In the first act, "Last Man in Universe Alpha-11”, Tanner played a businessman who was holed up in a hotel room filming himself giving his honest opinion to a man unknown to the audience on a controversial issue that he was supposed to present at an Ag-Fair. He was playing tug-of-war with himself and the issue.

The second act,"Last Man in Puntarenas”, was performed by Ratzlaff in an empty hotel restaurant at a celebration of his retirement. He gives a long and dry speech about his son's death in the health care system.

I think the biggest problem was how long and tedious the play was and the large use of vocabulary in the play. It made it hard to follow and frankly I didn't want to follow along.

I want to point out that what I wrote here is what I interpreted the play to be about, and I could likely be wrong. Forgive me if I am under wrong impressions.