Past Production

Company One presents…

Lost City

For full performance schedule please see the Calendar.

"Experimental theater" is sometimes thinly camouflaged terminology for "really weird stuff." But in the case of "Lost City," an original collaborative production by Company One, the experimentation is fresh and puzzling without being bizarre.

Playwrights Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller created the play with the Company One ensemble. (Bishop and Fuller are perhaps best known as the artistic directors of Independent Eye, the 30-year-old progressive arts ensemble now based in California.) The playwriting duo arrived in Boston with a title in mind and worked with the local cast through improvisations to create the characters and storyline.

In "Lost City," eight strangers are stranded overnight in the Rochester airport en route to Boston. Among them is Kareem (played by Keith Mascoll), an energetic playwright whose latest work just got panned in the Chicago newspapers. It is through Kareem's eyes -- as part maestro and part imaginer -- that each traveler reveals information about what the trip represents. Some stories are entertaining, others are tragic. All are intensely personal.

What seems a simple premise slyly meanders and splinters into an examination of hope and regret. Interspersed with innocuous, middle-of-the-night airport banter, the ensemble embarks on two imaginary sequences about identity. One sequence is made up of passionate conversations that the travelers have with one another or with people from their homes or histories. The other sequence is more rhythmic and interpretative, with the ensemble moving as a unit to create driven, dreamlike tableaus under Krista McCann's vivid lights.

The question is -- are these conversations really happening? Are they even possible? Or is Kareem imaging them on his own? It even comes into question whether Kareem is really a playwright or just an office temp with an active imagination as the characters replay different versions of their conversations, almost as living revisions.

Company One ensemble members create sharp and accessible characters in this production, each with a variation on self-awareness. And director Victoria Marsh harnesses fluidity and focus from each one. Mascoll delivers a charismatic Kareem, and Michelle Baxter creates a weathered yet intense Wilma, a mother. Naya Chang's turn as the talented musician, Viola, has a piercing edge while Mason Sand has an unsettling, although endearing one, as the aspiring sculptor Henry.

In "Lost City," the airport serves as a sort of emotional purgatory. Company One capably experiments with the shadowy gap between the search and the destination. And when sunrise arrives, it represents equally thoughts of new beginnings and basic survival.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

You have been waiting for your delayed plane forever. The interminable announcement drones reminders for the umpteenth time, and you look around, wondering about all the stories occupying the other seats at the gate. Lost City, presented by Company One and directed by Victoria Marsh, is the answer to your musing notion. Actually, it provides several answers, all of them accompanied by the found sounds of boredom.

Time drifts lazily around the characters as they wait for the plane to Boston and swap life stories to pass the time. An aspiring playwright (Keith Mascoll), intent on slinking back to the Hub after receiving withering critiques in Chicago, discovers the secret life of strangers around him as the stereotypes - the devoted mother, the jock, the weirdo, the poor little rich woman and the overachiever - dissolve to reveal real people just trying to get by. The playwright realizes early on that if he “listens to what nobody is saying,” he will bypass surface impressions to dive into the characters sitting on three double-sided orange benches in the waiting area.

What keeps the play from being a “Breakfast Club” for adults is the control the playwright character wields within the play. He rewrites scenes, stops the action to fix “unrealistic” situations and quietly prompts the others for more disclosure. Unfazed by his directions, the characters fulfill his requests as if it were their own motivation, stopping only occasionally to ask him if he is writing all of it down. The characters preview and replay their uncomfortable choices, second chances and confrontations, punctuated by the weird guy's hysterically funny interjections.

The two most poignant stories involve a mother confronting her wayward son and two lovers trying to work out their geographical differences. Mother and son, both parts brilliantly played by Michelle Baxter, meet in jail where he is being held for the neglect of his dead child. His mother shares with him that his father was also a drunk and a rapist, perhaps so he can come to terms with his own life. Shawn LaCount seamlessly transforms himself into two lovers: one, a tough Bostonian; the other, a shy San Francisco transplant trying to win his lover's heart back by returning to Boston. Both sides of the story reveal two men at an impasse, and La Count's performance is stunningly detailed.

Created in collaboration with the cast, the playwrights, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, peppered the script with Boston references and well placed comic relief, so that this well-fragmented tale of dreams, failures and desires clicked more often than not. They even provided the audience with a happy ending - not one of those treacly happily-ever-after endings, but a solid and real ending that even the irony tired can appreciate: getting on with one's life another day at sunrise.

Developed by theater artists Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller in collaboration with their cast, ``Lost City'' strives to find deeper meaning in this mundane situation.

The characters come, as usual, from all walks of life, and they're traveling to Boston - the ``lost city'' of the title - with serious intentions. Among them are a middle-aged African-American woman who plans on visiting her incarcerated son, a younger woman with hopes of taking part in an in-vitro fertilization program so she can become a single mother and a gay man who dreams of reconciling with his partner, a working-class type who definitely doesn't fit the ``Queer Eye'' stereotype.

They're brought together by the frustrated musings of Kareem, a playwright who is reeling from the reviews of his latest work in Chicago and finds inspiration in the lives of those around him in the waiting room. Gradually, he has the characters reveal themselves in monologues, showing that what lies beneath is far richer than what's seen on the surface.

It's an interesting concept, and succeeds a good deal of the time. The characters' stories unfold with a natural ease; and the disparate elements flow together through movement (staged by Victoria Marsh) and sound. Bishop and Fuller are known for their plays heard on National Public Radio and the ambient soundscape they've created here makes a strong, unifying element. In many ways, ``Lost City'' is closer to a radio play than anything else, and could adapt well to that medium.

cw-1The piece's single drawback is that it's too ambitious. Throughout, there's an attempt to draw some sort of spiritual meaning from the idea of Boston as the ``lost city'' that will fulfill these characters' hopes and dreams; but it is awkwardly textured into the whole, making the concept seem pretentious.

Nonetheless, the cast makes up for what it lacks in professional technique with passion derived from the unique process by which the piece was developed.

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