As the title clearly says, this play is about a typical middle American town.
But Middletown is anything but typical and the characters that populate it are anything but what you would expect in your average play about a middle American town.
Sounds confusing?
Well the playwright, Will Eno, who was was shortlisted for a Pulitzer prize, has been called the “Samuel Beckett of the John Stuart generation” by the New York Times, so…
This play takes on the potentially two dimensional subject of moderate, small town, small-minded people and turns it completely on its head. A subject that could be written off as predictable and mundane even, becomes mystical and totally enchanting.
A play about life and death and all those small and important moments in-between, Middletown is packed full of beautifully flawed and believable characters, all frankly telling their stories with surreal sense of humor and a profound ability to find redemption in the pain.
With such an exquisite play in their hands, how does Lost Angel Productions handle this precious material?
Astonishingly…whimsically and with great love and compassion for the gently crazy town folks of Middletown.
This production is set around a scale model of the town at the front of the stage. Each actor changing the focus of the scene by repositioning a tiny video camera inside the model which in turn projects what it sees behind the actors on stage and thus creating our setting.
It’s an utterly brilliant way of including the audience in the trick of theatre scenary. But somehow it manages to take us deeper into the play rather than breaking the magic of it all. Just wonderful…
There are also some stunning effects with shadow and light, but I don't want to tell you everything!
There are fantastic musical interludes provided by the sublime Tiffany Ann and Thomas Furr and band, along with some of the cast members, which are truly riveting, and bind us more and more intimately with these tragic and heartbreaking, warm and funny characters.
Nothing has been left to chance in this production.
The staging is wonderful, the music too and the actors, well, I was just blown away by absolutely everyone.
I was told that this play was “experimental” and I suppose it was in many ways. But what struck me most about it was that with all the thoughtful and inventive staging, the haunting and passionate music and the outstanding performances, I found it to be totally recognizable. What made it experimental and unusual actually made me feel closer to the characters, as if I already knew them and, as we do with our friends and family, I found myself making allowances for their eccentricities, as they might do for my own.
This production of Middletown is strange and unusual and brave and also brilliantly mirrors exactly how life truly is, how people truly are, beyond pretense, beyond ordinary and with no need for subtext.
It's full of people I wish I had been able to spend more time with and for one or two of them take them home and help them out.
Middletown really is stunning and I highly recommend it.
If you love the work of filmmakers Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson then you will love Middletown, a vivid portrait of the difficulty of consciousness, of the complications of the simplest life.
Middletown runs from August 9th to 29th Thursday through Saturday at 8pm.
Theatre Banshee
3435 W. Magnolia Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91505
United States