Charlene Baldridge | Theater Review
Through Oct. 11, British playwright Chloë Moss’s “This Wide Night” — a tense and touching two-hander set in present-day London — plays at Hillcrest’s ion theatre. If you love fine acting and meticulous work, do not miss it. Directed by Founder/Executive Artistic Director Claudio Raygoza (assistant director is Hannah Logan), actors Rhianna Basore (Marie) and Yolanda Franklin (Lorraine) are utterly convincing as friends who have no future, not with each other and not with life.
They met in prison, where they were cellmates. With no thought of moving in, the just-released Lorraine appears at Marie’s door. Marie persuades the exhausted Lorraine to stay for just one night. One night stretches over the course of the 90-minute work into what appears to be months.
Apparently more stable and employed part-time as a barmaid, Marie encourages Lorraine to locate the son she gave up for adoption when she was incarcerated years ago. She also promises to talk to her boss about a possible job opening at the pub and encourages Lorraine to get off her medications, bragging that she quit hers cold turkey.
The one-room flat is squalid and unkempt, and just as the women’s lives, is emblematic of their inability to tend to anything, let alone friendship, jobs and the creation of a new life.
Gradually, the playwright seduces onlookers to care for these women, to believe that they can have a new life. Then she dashes us with cold water. The journey from renewed acquaintance to seemingly genuine caring to deluge is a masterful, white-knuckle experience. It is exceptionally well supported by the actors, whose characters struggle with self and the other. Their fragile equanimity and amity is never overplayed, just present and always subject to explosion.
The play begins with Basore staring blankly at the telly, which has no sound and has been broken for months. Her state of mental disarray and physical exhaustion is apparent. After Lorraine arrives, the question is who takes care of the other. They take turns.
After its 2008 debut at Soho Theatre, “This Wide Night” toured women’s prisons in the UK. It received the 2009 Susan Smith Blackburn Playwriting Prize. The work goes right along with ion’s promise to deliver bold, uncompromising theatre.
That promise carries over into ion’s forthcoming ninth season, “Out of the Box,” which begins in November. Raygoza and Founding Producer and Artistic Director Glenn Paris have announced a season of new works written by either or both of them, one of which will make its off-Broadway premiere in June, then return to play here in August. Additionally, recently named Associate Artistic Director Kim Strassberger will stage the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical, “Sunday in the Park With George,” in September 2015.
—Charlene Baldridge has been writing about the arts since 1979. Her book “San Diego, Jewel of the California Coast” (Northland Publishing) is currently available in bookstores. She can be reached at [email protected].
