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Santa Barbara, October 4, 2001
INDEPENDENT
Arts and Entertainment
Mirror, Mirror
By D.J. Palladino
If you saw the play, you
have some idea how hard it was to write this first line. Actually
it wasn't, but the first thing a true reviewer should confess is how hard
it was not to
cringe during most of this great piece of theatre.
(Friends seated nearby kept poking me, though, as if I needed help.) the
play opens
with a dark shadow breaking from a lit doorway and Sangare enters, after
beautiful
cello music by Jakub Omsky, into a room with a light hanging over a desk
on which sits
a typwriter. For five minutes his comic gestures and utterances mimic
a writer's balky attempts to get a review off the ground when equanimity
seems to be closer than
passion. It is a real dilemma, exaggerated with utter grace. That would
be rich and
funny enough, but Sangare's real triumph is expanding the metaphor. The
play goes
on to universalize the experience.
Maybe non-writers won't
learn anything about the travails of play reviewers stuck
for words, but the activity in which real drama critics indulge underlies
the howling of
Western human spirit for recognition. I wish I was special, says the writer
manqué. It's Beckettian, and like Beckett, it's hilariously funny
while darkening.
More pertinent, Sangare has more physical presence than can be economically
conveyed.
Big, dressed in black, and with a shaven head, he hooks you with his gestures,
coming
down to the way his eyes roll to indicate sincerity. During the course
of the one-hour monodrama - his term- Sangare moves from desk to chair,
even out into the audience.
But it is his face and hands that mesmerize.
This is important theatre from a wider world. Nothing in this town, as
far as I'm concerned, matches the generosity of spirit that John Blondell's
World Fest makes manifest in
bringing work like this all the way from Poland into our little black
box theatre. I'm sorry
if you missed it, but stay tuned, as many of the plays the fest has imported
in the past
have returned. It's never painful for a critic to acknowledge great performances.
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