THE HANGOVER REPORT – David Greenspan’s THE THINGS THAT WERE THERE succinctly meditates on loss, memory, and family

Cesar J. Rosado, Caitlin Morris, David Greenspan, Mary Shultz, and Evander Duck, Jr. star in David Greenspan's "The Things That Were There" at the Bushwick Starr. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Cesar J. Rosado, Caitlin Morris, David Greenspan, Mary Shultz, and Evander Duck, Jr. star in David Greenspan’s “The Things That Were There” at the Bushwick Starr. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Last night, I caught David Greenspan’s The Things That Were There at the Bushwick Starr, in a co-production with the Abingdon Theatre Company. The play is a meditation on loss, memory, and family – themes that are not unfamiliar to Mr. Greenspan. Indeed, the last time I encountered Mr. Greenspan was this time last year (also in Brooklyn), when he regurgitated, astonishingly in its entirety as a one-man show (!), Eugene O’Neill’s six-hour-plus, generation-spanning Pulitzer Prize-winning beast of a play Strange Interlude (courtesy of the Transport Group).

Although The Things That Were has a running time of under an hour, its concerns are no less epic. Mr. Greenspan’s play is a dream-like compaction of three generations of a family. In it, Mr. Greenspan floats like a ghost across these generations, observing (semiconsciously) from different perspectives, their concerns, habits, and relationships. Set in some sort of Beckett-ian void, time and even reality seem to blur in the play, as if the nature of memory itself was being replicated for the stage. The end result is a gentle if somewhat mournful commemoration of the ephemeral nature of the present moment and the permanence of memory.

The production is directed with a delicate hand, as befits this whisper of a play, by Lee Sunday Evans, who has had much experience with molding more experimental, conceptual pieces of theater. Although Mr. Greenspan’s text may seem amorphous and overly precious at times, the contemplative performances from the cast of five – comprised of Cesar J. Rosado, Caitlin Morris, Mary Shultz, Evander Duck, Jr., and Mr. Greenspan himself – render a sense of specificity, grounding the production and providing the play with needed texture.

RECOMMENDED

 

THE THINGS THAT WERE THERE
Off-Broadway, Play
The Bushwick Starr, in conjunction with the Abingdon Theatre Company
50 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 3

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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