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Friday, August 03, 2007

UNDERGROUND ZERO FESTIVAL: "Go"

Go cleverly subtitles itself "a life in progress," but the downside to that is that it's also a work in progress. That means it is uneven, technically wobbly, and all over the place. In other words, perfect for the festival circuits. The play is further confused by being split into two parts, "A" and "B," which can also be identified as Here and There, or by Gillian Chadsey and Michelle Talgarow, who play themselves. Their goal is to get from their part of the stage to the other; to do so, they recount scenes from their own lives that have them either growing or stagnating (as we are wont to do from time to time). However, the show isn't an even split (Chadsey does most of the work [which is fine; she's the more engaging actress]), and their framing scenes (at a school desk or in a subway car) are too obscure to be helpful.

Go
is a work of neo-futurism that doesn't go far enough: Chadsey runs, but never truly collapses, and when interacting with the audience (most notably as a dominatrix), shies away behind a wall of bluster, which lessens the effect. The key scene is a six-verse song called "Relationships" that Chadsey sings while badly playing a ukulele: that one scene alone goes from happy to sad to manic to violent. Go from that, and Go gets a whole lot better.

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