A Festival of One-Acts Illuminates Souls in Trouble A Neil LaBute Play Anchors Summer Shorts Festival
Laura Collins-HughesAugust 5, 2014: “The worst thing was to indulge you,” the woman ruefully tells her disheveled son, who, at 25, is still incapable of making his way in the world. If she weren’t there to stop him, Corey would spend his days playing Minecraft on his laptop. Such is the trouble for mother and man-child in Daniel Reitz’s terribly tender, very funny short play Napoleon in Exile. Directed by Paul Schnee, it leads off Summer Shorts: Series B, presented by Throughline Artists at 59E59 Theaters and also featuring new works by Neil LaBute and Albert Innaurato. Central to Mr. Reitz’s play is that Corey is “on the spectrum”: acutely intelligent, socially hobbled. In Will Dagger’s extraordinarily sympathetic performance, he is also urgent, ashamed, odd, lovable, scared and desperate. Henny Russell, as his mother, has the less rewarding part, but Mr. Reitz has written a rich role in Corey, and Mr. Dagger makes it indelibly his own. The men in Mr. LaBute’s morally complex The Mulberry Bush, like Peter and Jerry in Edward Albee’s classic one-act The Zoo Story, are strangers in a park. Their meeting is not accidental, though it appears that way at first to quiet, distinguished-looking Bill (Victor Slezak), who often eats lunch on a secluded bench. Younger and seemingly lower-class, Kip (J. J. Kandel) has come to accuse Bill — to specify the charge would be a spoiler — and defend his own family.
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