THEATRE REVIEW
Anna Camp and Thomas Sadoski in Belleville at the Pasadena Playhouse (Photo – Philicia Endelman)
An engrossing psychological drama that keeps you puzzling and guessing, but not because you are buoyed by grand, shocking waves of twists and turns, but instead because you are more gently rocked back and forth on the ripples of quick intrusions of “alternate facts.”
By Carol Edger Germain
Through more than half of the play you are maintaining your deciphering powers on an even keel, because the hints and contributing info are doled out steadily, never quite leading far enough down a particular path for your mind to pop up with an “aHA!” Anna Camp and Thomas Sadoski play the millenial newlyweds Abby and Zack arriving in the up-and-gentrifying Belleville area of Paris to live their dream, and Moe Jeudy-Lamour and Sharon Pierre-Louis play Alioune and Amina, their Muslim landlords, parents of a new baby. Amina runs the show in that marriage with her no-nonsense purpose and direction, and while Alioune is dedicated and dutiful, he does enjoy sneaking upstairs to share a joint with Zack now and then. Abby’s overly-romanticized expectations of life in Paris, based on a wonderful trip her parents shared, are soon skewed because her back-home entitlement status and minimal French don’t translate as well as she expected. She is hyper and overshares her immature and insecure thoughts (although with some laugh-out-loud lines at times) and Zack appears to be the dedicated physician, magically and nobly obtaining an assignment with Doctors Without Borders to coordinate with Abby’s Parisian dreamscape. However, when Abby arrives home early because she has no students for her yoga class, and finds Zack home early unexpectedly as well (and amusing himself in the bedroom with the computer), we get our first hint that this marriage is not as peachy-keen as it first appeared.
We get a few quick pokes in the eye with jagged interactions but at first the jolts just stop on the surface, we’re not sure where they are going. You can’t help but use the term “Hitchcockian” because of the building psychological breaks, but even so, it’s a different feeling, a bumpier ride. There are subtle “Psycho” illusions (i.e., lots of time in the shower and bathroom for the couple, and lots of use of a very large knife, including a sequence that made me squirm and sufficient blood), but perhaps they may have been subtle only for me, because it didn’t really hit me until later because my guessing gene was going in another direction. Finally the action starts getting louder, faster, and brighter and maintains its pace until the end, with Zack disappearing outside while Abby considers a cringe-worthy course of action relating to her stubbed toe, and the landlords bursting in after discovering their apartment had been broken into and ransacked, and then bam-bam-bam it all crashes down, the secrets explode all around and all the characters, some more than others, discover that they did not know their closest loved ones and friends as well as they thought they did. And although there is no obviously intentional deceit at the outset, I ended up nodding my head, thinking how true that is, you may really never know someone as deeply as you should, and would like to, no matter the length of the relationship or the depth of the shared goals and experiences. Although the flow was a bit uneven at times, and Abby could have been a little less hyper, it was a good production and will likely get even better in its final three weeks.
(L-R) Thomas Sadoski, Moe Jeudy-Lamour and Sharon Pierre-Louis. (Photo – Philicia Endelman).
Definitely worth experiencing and enjoying the brain tease. One puzzling aspect that I think should be tweaked is the use of French by the landlords here and there. A couple of times the obvious French speakers in the audience laughed but the situation and the associated English dialogue weren’t sufficient to give us the whole story of the scene, and at the end, as Alioune and Amina clean the apartment for the next tenants, there is quite a bit of dialogue between them that would have made for a better epilogue if it had included some English, enough to expose the gist of their conversation. Amazingly, as my friend and I were discussing that issue as we were walking back to our car, we heard two men speaking French behind us and we engaged in about a 20-minute conversation where they translated the end (as well as a couple of earlier scenes) for us. Even more amazingly, one of them had lived int Belleville for 12 years and gave us some tidbits of local color. In any event, I recommend this production – but hurry, it’s only there for a short run, just until May 13.
This Article was mentioned on brid-gy.appspot.com