Cut to the Quick The Side Project
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The two programs playing now include 11 ten-minute works grouped under the title “Atom Smashers” and six slightly longer pieces collected as “After/math.” The latter group deals with time, memory, and distinctions between illusion and reality. Things get off to a rough start with David Alan Moore’s Unnamed Time Play, a circular tale that uses repeated phrases to suggest the interconnectedness of a shy teen, his English teacher, and a dying old man. The strands fail to cohere, and David Bell’s poorly paced staging doesn’t help any. Carl Bergetz’s Alternate Set of Procedures is more accomplished, though its depiction of an interrogator torturing an enemy combatant in a darkened room is unfortunately a cliche of the war on terror. Its chief asset is the way it shows—through the torturer’s tortured logic, leading questions, and slippery use of language—how the need to justify officially sanctioned brutality leads to the complete estrangement of what we say from what we mean. Protesting that you’re not the enemy proves that you are, the government takes away our liberties to preserve our freedom, and so on. “It’s all very complex,” says the interrogator at one point. “I don’t even understand what I’m saying sometimes.”
The final two one-acts of “After/math” revolve around memory. In Corinne J. Kawecki’s Demons and Monsters, four longtime friends realize, over the course of a night out, that it’s what they don’t say about the past—particularly their messy couplings with one another—that keeps their friendship intact. Chelsea Marcantel’s Stunt, meanwhile, charts the effects of a teen’s affair with his geometry teacher on his later relationship with a live-in girlfriend. Kawecki’s script is unshaped, but in Marcantel’s nuanced, undidactic handling of her story, the girlfriend’s eagerness to use the statutory rape as an all-purpose explanation for her boyfriend’s behavior demonstrates the limitations of letting one chapter in a life stand for the whole story.
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