The Hotel Nepenthe

Play (2011)
by John Kuntz

With Marianna Bassham, John Kuntz, Daniel Berger-Jones, Georgia Lyman

I had seen The Hotel Nepenthe when the Actors’ Shakespeare Project performed it at a storefront in Davis Square last year. It is written by the very funny actor John Kuntz, who I have seen in innumerable comic Shakespearean roles at the ASP.

Starring here, as well, is the exceptionally fine Shakespearean actress Marianna Bassham, who I have seen in multiple ASP productions, notably and recently in Twelfth Night.

This play is a disparate romp, authored in an improvisational mode and collagelike in effect. Apparently it began as a series of loosely federated scenes author Kuntz had written for his acting students at The Boston Conservatory.

There is virtually no restraint when it comes to the takeoffs on sixties shows and their associated theme songs. Tucked in between these are various, dark, and sometimes funny, episodes involving an array of characters whose relations it is, most of the time, difficult to ascertain.

The rough high-concept here seems to be the issue of vacancy in the middle of a human mess. The author seems to strive for a silent core in the middle of the muddles when there are infrequent pauses in the various hijinks. I am not sure that existential peek in the gaps between the episodes of romp actually finds its way to vision, but I sense that is what the author is striving after.

Nepenthe is the name, derived from ancient Greek, of a drug that cures sorrow by inducing forgetfulness. Ironically, it gives its name – Nepenthes – to a genus of carnivorous plants. Both senses of the word seem operative with regard to the play – as that which numbs suffering, and that which eats creatures alive.

All four actors are good, and I would say that their energy in performance goes a long way to delivering what this play does deliver. The show goes on for an hour and forty-five minutes without intermission, and I think, had it gone on for an hour, it would have been enough. Trimmed down hijinks and more tightly controlled linkages between the loosely strung pieces of the story would have gone a long way towards making this a nice and quick diversion. It has all the elements of a dark impressionistic farce which would work better if shorter, with a tautened narrative, a more consistent tone and the verbal fat trimmed.

– BADMan