Press
Trevor Allen's piece soars above festival's other plays
Review by Steven Winn
San Francisco Chronicle
September 12, 2000
It happened at the Morrison Planetarium Sunday night, six hours into a marathon day at the San Francisco Fringe Festival: A piece of real theater broke out. Chain Reactions is just the sort of thing that ought to bloom at this annual festival of risk-taking, noncommercial work -- but so rarely does. This suggestive show about physics, fear and love offers an intelligent, artful sketch of greater things to come. That stands out like an island in a sea of amateur auteurism, campy self-indulgence and earnest confessional monologues.
For 50 minutes at the planetarium, at least, the odds could be forgotten. The audience is in on something in the making here, as writer-director Trevor Allen concocts a suite of beguiling monologues, quartets and one duet for a company of four absorbing voices.
The first section, "Synchronicity," begins with a rather dense overture delivered by a physicist (Ellen Koivisto). Then a street bookseller-panhandler (Kieron Edwards) chimes in with his more earthbound philosophy: "A buck for a book," he growls. They're joined by the delightfully crusty Helen Slayton Hughes as a skeptical woman being romanced by a poet in a bar and the becalmed Paul Gerrior as a professor.
The four voices overlap, diverge and fuse in the ensemble's choral interplay. Then Allen takes his verbal fugues apart and lets us hear the voices on their own. The speaker's quirks and unintended connections to other realities wink in and out of view.
The drifting, musical quality of Chain Reactions is enhanced by the setting. Stars float across the planetarium's domed ceiling, studded now and then by photo-illustrations that mark each section like silent epigrams. The amplified voices echo soothingly in the space.
Slayton-Hughes plays Einstein, and Edwards is his wartime nuclear physicist colleague Leo Szilard in the anguished if somewhat stiffer middle section.
Part 3, "The Mistaken Variations," turns the disparate imagery of stoplights, a bachelor's fishbowl, a coma and pregnancy into a ravishing meditation on life's patterns and uncertainties.
Though Chain Reactions benefits from the planetarium's light-speckled sky and spacey acoustics, the show hews to the Fringe Festival's mobile, low-tech principles. The actors work at music stands without props or scenery or even much movement. It's the language and ideas that soar.
E-mail us at trevor-at-blackboxtheatre.com