A Boy and Girl Meet Face to Face, Even When They’re Not in the Same Room
‘Blink,’ by Phil Porter at 59E59 Theaters
Neil Genzlinger
June 9, 2014: Blink is everything you want in a relationship play: funny, painful, affecting. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that its two characters, young social misfits named Sophie (Lizzy Watts) and Jonah (Thomas Pickles), rarely address each other. It’s a risky mode of storytelling, but the playwright, Phil Porter, makes it pay off beautifully. The play, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at the 59E59 Theaters, introduces Jonah and Sophie through direct address to the audience. Jonah describes being raised on a farm in central England that was a religious commune, with his father in charge. His mother, he says, died when he was 15 but left him the means to escape and a letter encouraging him to do so. And thus the awkward country boy ended up in London, renting a room from Sophie. She too tells of losing a parent, her beloved father, who had raised her after her mother left when she was 2. And she too is an odd duck. How odd? She anonymously sends Jonah a video monitor. When he turns it on, he can see her, though he does not realize that she is his landlord (the rental having been arranged through an agency) and that she lives upstairs.
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