TALKING MASKS by Adam Seelig (One Little Goat). To November 28. See listing. Rating: NNN
In Talking Masks, playwright Adam Seelig weaves together two eons-old myths, one Biblical, one classical: Abraham and his sons, and Oedipus and his mother/wife. The clever result is big on wordplay and the knotty connections, sometimes sexual, between parent and child.[rssbreak]
The work’s first half is devoted to paternal links, with the diapered son/Son (Richard Harte) confronting his father/Father (a Zorro-masked Andrew Moodie, backwards astride a wooden horse) the Biblical (and Koranic) story is not only Old Testament but also suggestive of the New. The second turns to maternal concerns, with the Son cast back and forth between two Mothers (Jane Miller and Cathy Murphy), who reveal that he had an elder brother, an echo of the Isaac and Ishmael story.
Under Seelig’s direction, the hour-long production is full of wit and language games, finely realized by the cast and aided by Jackie Chau’s costumes and set, a blend of Greek statuary and Christian symbols, lit by Laird MacDonald.
It helps to know the original texts, but regardless, there’s lots of enjoyable theatrics in the presentation. The father/son section is sometimes a bit too cryptic in its riddling, but the mothers/son confrontation, helped by Christopher Stanton’s resonant and reverberating sound design, turns Murphy and Miller (heard both live and recorded) into a vocal quartet riffing on the sound and sense of what they say.
