Just Mill About, You Know, as Any Crowd Would Do
Alan Ayckbourn’s Latest, ‘Arrivals & Departures’
Ben Brantley
June 5, 2014: The orders are as impossible as they are imperious: “Do try and merge.” Those words are barked out by a British military officer to a sullen soldier and the eyewitness she has been assigned to protect during a counterterrorism sting in a London train station. But really, does the major truly expect anybody to merge under such circumstances — to blend in with a crowd, to seem one with strangers? After all, these characters from Arrivals & Departures, the poignant new comedy that opened on Wednesday night at 59E59 Theaters, inhabit the universe of Alan Ayckbourn. And in his carefully charted cosmos, people are lonely planets, stuck in solitary orbits. Collision might occur from time to time. But merging? Arrivals & Departures, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, is the first of three shows by Mr. Ayckbourn to be staged in repertory this month under the collective title “Ayckbourn Ensemble.” They are all directed by their author, one of Britain’s best-loved dramatists and perhaps its most staggeringly prolific.
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