Skip to main content

This Flat Earth by Lindsey Ferrentino at Playwrights Horizons

More like this flat play, am I right?

I think Lindsey Ferrentino is a very talented and versatile playwright but her newest play, This Flat Earth at Playwrights Horizons, is startlingly inept and unfocused. It's as though she threw everything she could at the wall just to see what would stick.

This Flat Earth is about the all-too-timely topic of school shootings, and we focus on Julie, a survivor of a recent middle school one. Julie lives with her father in a small walk up apartment in a New England town. It's quickly evident that this family isn't as well off as the other students in the school; they live in an apartment, Julie doesn't have a cell phone or laptop, and has to rent her violin for the school orchestra. And she is, understandably, having a hard time adjusting to things after the shooting. But her character is all over the place--she's inappropriate and cracks jokes about dead students, she's terrified of the noises she hears in the middle of the night, she's dangerously naive, and unrealistically ignorant. And this is indicative as the play as whole. There are a ton of interesting ideas at play; PTSD, grief, classism, father-daughter relationships, survivor's guilt, and children trying to come to terms with a terrible tragedy they should never, ever have to experience. But nothing is developed. In fact, it's as though Ferrentino thought she had to throw everything and the kitchen sink into her play. Word of advice: less is more.

The most ridiculous aspect of This Flat Earth is the moment when Julie reads a newspaper headline and realizes what happened to her was just one of the many senseless shootings to occur in schools. We're supposed to believe she has never heard of these things happening until now. When her friend, Zander, who does have a cell phone and laptop, questions this, Julie chalks it up to not owning those things or watching the news. (She does, however, know about some massage in Japan that will apparently make your breasts grow. How does she know of this but not of the school shootings that are happening all too frequently in her own country?) This is all very convenient and quite frankly, lazy. She questions why grown ups keep letting this happen, and why nobody has done anything about it, but it just seems like Ferrentino thought she had to include this in her play about gun violence but doesn't actually develop it into a lingering plot point. It really adds nothing to the action.

This Flat Earth doesn't actually have a conflict. The closest it gets to one is Lisa, a mother of a girl who was killed in the shooting who keeps hanging around Julie's father, Dan, realizes that Dan is using his work address to keep Julie in the school. Because she feels it's her responsibility to make sure everyone is where they're supposed to be, Lisa reports this to the principal. Which means Julie cannot attend the school anymore. Which also means she wasn't supposed to be there in the first place when the shooting happened. Again, another interesting thread that ultimately doesn't mean anything for the play. It's hard to sympathize with Lisa here when she's okay with having a child removed from her school, away from her friends, after such a traumatic event. And again, Ferrentino expects her audience to suspend disbelief; Julie doesn't seem to grasp how different her financial situation is to her classmates until this moment.

But then we're told by Cloris, the magical negro-esque character who lives upstairs from Dan and Julie and really does nothing to advance the "plot" at all, that all of this really doesn't matter and Julie's life will be okay in the end. This shooting is just one of the terrible things to happen in life, and eventually people will forget about it. If this is Ferrentino's way of saying that this kind of tragic violence happens so much in America that people become desensitized to it, it, like all of her other ideas, is shoehorned in. What this play did not need is the Our Town ending that feels disconnected from the rest of the text.

This Flat Earth has good intentions, and there's a good play in there somewhere, but it needed another workshop or two. Someone needed to cull out the strongest ideas and package them in a stronger play. It seems like theaters are rushing works by these hot up-and-coming playwrights to the the stage, and not really grasping if and why these plays should be seen. It's okay to actually develop and workshop a play!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Amy and the Orphans by Lindsey Ferrentino at the Roundabout Theatre Company

There's so much to celebrate about Lindsey Ferrentino's Amy and the Orphans. The play is not only one of the better things of the season but it manages to be funny, entertaining, well-acted, and a major victory for inclusion. Ferrentino's title character has Down Syndrome, and is played by Jamie Brewer, who also has the disease (as does her understudy, Eddie Barbanell. The play becomes Andy and the Orphans when he plays the role.) Amy is never the butt of a joke, never a punch line, and is never exploited, as writers and directors often tend to do when dealing with disabled actors or characters. But of course, that's Ferrentino's intention. Amy has been locked away in group homes (some terrible, some good) her entire life, with limited time spent with her own family. She has had to fend for herself but has developed into a strong individual with likes and dislikes, and even has a boyfriend and a job. Amy has clearly had to overcome a great deal in her life, and...

Fireflies by Donja R. Love at the Atlantic Theater Company

Okay, look, I get it, two-handers are tough. You have two characters with which to tell your story, and you have to somehow tell this story with as little exposition as possible. You have to show, not tell. Are you listening, Donja Love? Love's current play, Fireflies , tells the story of a married African American couple in 1963. He's a preacher, traveling the southern part of the country to speak at the funerals of other African Americans who have died due to racial terrorism. (When the play begins, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Birmingham has just occurs.) She's a doting and devoted housewife who goes so far as to write her husband's speeches and sermons for him. But what her husband, Charles, doesn't know is that she secretly smokes, she wants to abort the baby she's carrying, and she writes explicit letters to a woman she's in love with whom she only met once, briefly. Oh, and did I mention she, Olivia, has PTSD a...

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theater

Well, here we are, folks. The last review of the 2017-2018 season. And what a show to go out on. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is simply an event. The Lyric theater has been renovated for the show, the marquee is bigger than anything we've ever seen in New York (akin to the gorgeous facades we see in London), the merch is plentiful, you can order drinks at your seat through an app, people are walking around in wizard robes. These two plays are unlike anything we've ever seen on Broadway. And in a sense, it seems simply like a cash-grab. We've done the novels, the movies, the theme park, of course there should be a stage show. This is all a part of Harry Potter brand. Quite frankly, it seems very icky when you think about it. Is this what Broadway has come to? And yes, the rumors are true: the script itself isn't the most perfect. It's not that it's not well-written, it just lacks any sense of nuisance that you'd find in strong dramatic writing. Yes, ...