Review: Not much drama as sad folk tell all - The Canberra Times

MONOLOGUE MOMENT: Ian Croker, one Telling 
Moments mixed bag of performances

by Frank McKone

Telling Moments.  Monologues by Robert Reinhart, Adele Lewin, Tessa Bremner, Margaret Fischer, Keith Curran and Neal Bell selected and directed by Adam Maher for A.R.T.S. at The Street Theatre, January 6-22.

This mixed bunch is a pot-pourri of mainly gay and lesbian scents, with a strong smell of death, actual or emotional.  Though some pieces are humorous, even occasionally very funny, the lives of these disparate characters are essentially sad and at the extremes, bleak.

The bunch is also of mixed quality.  Reinhart, a well-known New York gay writer, communications executive and media producer, wrote Telling Moments as a collection of 15 gay monologues, which sell to actors to use as audition pieces.  Though published in 1994, I could find no internet reference to their production on stage in toto.  The other pieces performed here are a mix of one-offs and monologues taken out of plays.  

Reinhart's writing is clearly the best of the bunch, but with only some of his 15 presented, and the other pieces having a different focus and not so well written, the show is not clearly integrated.  Some of Reinhart's characters  do make references to each other, but the point of this is lost on the non-Reinhart characters.  So, despite short bookend scenes, there isn't any dramatic development for the audience to follow.

Performances also ranged from fair to excellent.  Bringing in only one woman asked too much of Adele Lewin, while Oliver Baudert and Ian Croker had real style and I was particularly impressed by the strength of the younger Jeremy Just's acting.  On opening night the acting seemed to free up in the second half, and the audience responded in kind, so we can look forward to the show settling in quickly.  

The musicians, Helen Way (cello) and Brett Janiec (clarinet) played with verve and great style between the telling moments.  The musical links, composed by Helen Way and Tim Hansen, were neat and thematically pointed, successfully helping to hold the evening together.

In summary, an interesting and partially successful show, which is worth seeing to appreciate different lives of horror and humour as each character expresses his or her thoughts and feelings directly to us.

First published in The Canberra Times, January 10, 2005

[Ed: A reply followed from me, two days later through Letters to the Editor, Canberra Times Jan 12, 2005]

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

January 12 2005

Frank McKone’s mostly constructive review of Telling Moments (CT January 10, Times 2, p.8) contains some disappointing factual errors which I should like to correct.

The work is unfairly denigrated by his suggestion that the monologues were only intended as audition pieces and also that they had never actually been performed. Both of these observations are wrong. 

Firstly, Author Robert Reinhart published all the monologues in 1994, where he clearly states in the preface of the book that they can be performed either as a complete entertainment in any sequence or [italics added] used separately as useful audition pieces. 

Secondly, the play was premiered at New York’s internationally acclaimed performance space, The Kitchen, whose board of directors includes composer Philip Glass. The Kitchen serves as a venue for more established artists to take unusual creative risks. Later, the work shifted to New York’s Kaufman Theatre (at 534 West 42nd Street, not the one at the American Museum of Natural History).

Tony Magee

Artistic Administrator

ARTS Theatre Company

From page 2 of the program