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FUNNY a new play by Shawn B. Hirabayashi
Theatre Row . NYC |
DARK COMEDY . How bad do things have to get before you hire a hit man to kill your
best friend? In this surreal world where time runs wild, the everyday is taken to extremes. Beginning in
NYC and ending up in Papua New Guinea, the play examines the moments when life's absurdity becomes all too
apparent. |
Winner, Off Off Broadway Review Award for Excellence
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"...a terrific production at Vital Theatre under the crisply inventive direction of Julie Hamberg. Hamberg directed with an intensity perfectly in tune with Hirabayashi's view -- by occasionally allowing the pace to slow down, she savored moments of salient information and made magic with just the simplest of strokes. She also coaxed terrific performances from the enormously appealing cast. ...a moment of convulsive, theatrical joy. ...it is an intelligent, thought-provoking piece of writing that has been given an intelligent, thought-provoking production." Doug DeVita OOBR |
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CAST |
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PRODUCTION TEAM |
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HEAD HONCHOS | |
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ERIK KEVER RYLE* IVANNA CULLINAN* JEREMY BRISIEL* |
Giovanni Forrest Alice Wicks Delia Hampton Ex |
JULIE HAMBERG MIRANDA HARDY ARTHUR SHETTEL DOUGLAS SHEARER* JENNY LOBLAND LISA WEBB JOSHUA DUNN |
Playwright Director Scenic Design Lighting Design Costume Design Sound Design & Original Music Production Stage Manager Assistant Director Assistant SM & The Voices Scenic Associate Assistant Set Design |
STEPHEN SUNDERLIN |
Artistic Director Managing Director General Manager |
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DESCRIPTION . In
the simplest description, FUNNY is a surreal dark comedy by Shawn B.
Hirabayashi. But here is a wonderful description by writer David Orlowski
that I've always loved:
Funny is a darkly comic meditation on how karma plays out in social relationships – the unforeseen and absurd repercussions both of actions and of inactions. Funny takes the familiar cliché that “what goes around, comes around” and puts it through the topologic mutations of a moebius strip or a Klein bottle – what comes around in this play comes around twisted, knotted, frayed and from unexpected directions, as when the lead characters reminisce about a time twenty years ago when they tried to watch the sun rise while facing West. Alice and Delia have been such close friends for so long that they have grown close as a pair of sisters, and just as dysfunctional. And perhaps without the bond of actual kinship to keep them together, the tension beneath the surface of their relationship inevitably drives them apart. Alice sees the impossibility of changing their relationship by talking about it, and so she embarks on a path of arranged murder. Someone’s eye is put out, one character is literally trapped in the dying, and then dead, embrace of another, and everybody passes through a mysterious river region of Papua New Guinea, where time runs differently than in New York and the rest of the industrialized world. Everyone wonders if things could or should have been different, if things could be different now if things had been differently in the past, and someone else is always there to disagree. |
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SPECIAL THANKS Danielle Delgado, Judith Hawking, Meir Ribalow & New River Dramatists, Milan Stitt, Le Wilhelm, Tashal Brown, Katie Slenk & Allie Los |
photos credits:
Sun Productions |
Copyright Julie Hamberg 2007-2008. Last updated 02/04/2008 .
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