After All The Terrible Things
I Do

Play (2014)
by A. Rey Parmatmat

With Zachary Booth (Daniel), Tina Chilip (Linda)

After college, Daniel (Zachary Booth), an aspiring writer, returns to his home town and applies for a job in Linda’s (Tina Chilip) bookstore. As their interview unfolds into something more penetrating and revealing, Daniel’s stories about young male homosexuals draws out autobiographical accounts on both sides of the aisle.

Wonderfully evocative and narratively interesting, this play is about homosexuality and the forms of brutality it engenders from all quarters. Developing from a simple interview, the relationship between Daniel and Linda takes on significant dimensions when she begins to probe and prod him. She has good reason to want to look deeper, and, as she does so, difficult dimensions in Daniel’s tale begin to emerge. But those call up, as well, some of the difficult dimensions in Linda’s life, and one eventually sees how the title of the play, taken from a poem by Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), begins to characterize the shape of the developing accounts. (By the way, the play’s use of O’Hara’s example, and of his poetry, invoking him repeatedly, is fabulous.)

Remarkably intricate in its weaving of the psychological web, yet not mechanical in doing so, the play builds dramatic force without chicanery. Step by step the opening of the various Pandora’s Boxes occurs, until, through reference to a cast of several unseen characters and their networks of relations to the two present onstage, we get a developed picture of a tortured and difficult personal landscape. The unfolding of that tragic vista and the creation of the sense that it need not always be so combine to produce the play’s particular magic.

Tina Chilip’s Linda is taut, spicy, staccato and aggressive in a completely understandable way. As her story unfolds, the nature of her compensatory behaviors becomes clearer and the account Linda gives, in Chilip’s deft hands, makes tremendous emotional sense.

Zachary Booth’s Daniel travels from bearing a charming ease, comfortably expressive of his homosexuality, to a more complex state reverberating with echoes from multiple past lives. Both a young innocent and not innocent at all, Daniel, through Booth’s alchemy of character, conveys that transition convincingly, gradually revealing the power behind the screen quite remarkably.

Together, the actors form a compelling pair, an unlikely duo that jostles with one another until, through significant interchange, they actually do become believably connected.

Author A. Rey Pamatmat, director Peter DuBois and both actors are to be commended for creating a fabric that covers such broad and interesting psychological terrain, at once heartrending and uplifting.

The set, which depicts a bookstore with several rooms and interior spaces, is artfully designed, creating a sense of varied spaces which, despite their variety and relative expanse, frame, but do not overwhelm, the actors.

Lowdown: Beautifully done, interesting writing, great acting, and a wonderful set.

– BADMan