By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Coming back to the Donnell after a long pandemic-induced absence feels at once familiar and yet different.
The stage is set and ready to go, but where theatergoers should be is a ring of cameras, fixed on the stage.
This is not unlike the situation the characters in Will Eno’s “Tragedy: a tragedy” find themselves in.
“Tragedy: a tragedy which is a comedy, will be livestreamed Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $5 are available for purchase online through the ShowTixU platform.
The play, directed by Lesa Lockford, begins with a local newscast in progress. Something strange is gripping the world, a night that will not end.
“The horror is palpable,” says Frank (Blaine Hudak), the anchor, back in the studio.
Now mind you, this endless night has not been going on for a long time. Rather for some unknown reason people sensed it as soon as the sun went down.
Yet as John (Fern Torres) , a reporter out in the field, literally, says this is unprecedented in the long “star-spangled” history of night. He reports that the dogs are behaving as dogs do walking in circles, barking, licking your hand. John it turns out is deeply affected by his relationship with his childhood pet Jolly, who had heartworm.
John’s not the only one trying to track down this story, and any meaning it holds. Constance (Anna Edington) is stationed at a home seemingly abandoned by its inhabitants, who not long ago were having a picnic on the lawn, and created a human pyramid. She reports on the mundane details freighted with new meaning in these odd circumstances. She sees people riding a tandem bicycle, a balloon floats overhead, she finds a note from someone who had stopped by earlier and also found no one home.
At one point she announces that “it’s quiet still but still not silent.”
Michaela (Nikki Stitak), the station’s legal expert, is looked on and provides the most drama, as she reports on a series of statements emanating from the governor’s office. The first is largely bland with its let’s-stick-together rhetoric, mostly reassuring, but slightly off. The statements become increasingly unhinged – “let the looting begin,” orders one – until the governor declares that he’s done some soul searching “and didn’t find anything.”
Asked for analysis by Frank, Michaela is just as lost as the governor.
And so the broadcast proceeds. Frank is the one in the hot seat bouncing from reporter to reporter whose utterances become less and less connected to reality. They have nothing to say, but say it anyways to comic effect.
John is unsuccessful wringing anything of substance from one guy (Mikey Ragusa) hanging out on a bench, eating.
John asks him if he noticed anything strange as night fell. “No,” the man responds.
Yet the witness finds his voice as the news crew lapses into comatose silence. He gets the last word as he does remember “this whole neighborhood of stuff I saw.”
He reiterates this wistfully, as something remembered from long ago, the way John remembers Jolly. He does not strain to find meaning, but lets his bland observations speak for themselves.
For all its absurdist humor, the play’s sense of a mundane trauma resonates in these pandemic times. Tragedy has never been so funny.
