ion theatre’s latest is a meticulous, timely & suspenseful production
Por Charlene Baldridge | Crítico de Teatro SDUN
Staged by ion theatre founding producing artistic director Glenn Paris, British playwright Simon Stephens’ 2009 work titled “Punk Rock” is so outrageously suspenseful that at its conclusion one realizes one has breathed only by gasps for nearly two hours.
The play bears a surface resemblance to “The History Boys” and most especially to the musical “Spring Awakening” in that the actors – portraying students in a British public school sixth form, equivalent in parts to our high school – are of the same age. At ion four actors are bona fide teenagers, ranging from 15 to 18 years old. Four others are college age.
In between scenes they leap onto chairs in the school library and dance to release their pubescent angst. The library is the meeting place for these kids between, before and after classes. At 17, they are under considerable pressure to do well in exams that will qualify them for study at schools such as Eton or Cambridge.
The students are, by turns, enigmatic, sometimes appallingly hateful, and at other times utterly beguiling, vulnerable and innocent.
Lilly and William are perhaps the most mercurial. In wooing Lilly, William tells whopper lies, which are later revealed. Lizzie Morse portrays Lilly, an extremely intelligent girl who has just transferred into the school located near Manchester. Her initial introduction to the others gives those seated in the dark a chance to meet the kids gradually.
William (masterful J. Tyler Jones), who’s never had a girlfriend, falls hard for Lilly, who later enters into a sexual relationship with Nicholas (Ryan Casselman).
Though she would like you to believe she is free-spirited, Cissy (Samantha Littleford) is involved in an abusive relationship with the volatile Bennett (incendiary Benjamin Cole), who verbally abuses all his classmates.
The others include Tanya (Samantha Vesco), easily the best adjusted of the group even though she is incessantly teased about her weight, and David Ahmadian as the still-waters-run-deep Chadwick. Emma Rasse appears briefly as Lucy, Bennett’s younger sister. In the play’s final scene, Charles Maze portrays Dr. Harvey, who seeks causes for the catastrophic event toward which the story’s unfolding propelled us so inexorably.
One might carp about the necessity of this macabre, delusional scene, but because we the people seek answers for incomprehensible events, it seems requisite.
Paris’s tautly staged and timely production is played upon a beautifully appointed set by lobby raider Claudio Raygoza and is meticulously costumed by Courtney Fox Smith. It is further supported by Melanie Chen’s sound and Karin Filijan’s lighting.
Not for the faint of heart: high school is hell. This is the good and the gruesome of it.
‘Punk Rock’
WHERE: ion theatre company, 3704 Sixth Ave. (Hillcrest)
WHEN: Thurs. – Sat. at 8 p.m., and Sat. at 4 p.m. through March 9
INFO: 619-600-5020?
WEB: iontheatre.com
