The Ice-Breaker
Subject: Quicktake - "The Ice Breaker" by David Rambo
Date: Fri, Oct 27, 11:35 PM
Quicktake on THE ICE BREAKER
Hollywood veteran David Rambo's "The Ice-Breaker", originally commissioned for the Geffen in L.A. is having part of its National New Play Network's "rolling national premiere" at the New Rep over at the Arsenal Center for the Arts. The piece has the feel of a treatment intended for development in a small film being tried out as a play. As a concept, comparing the immensity of an incipient ice-age to a December/May (June) relationship between an older male scientist in seclusion and a brash young grad student is intriguing if inconclusive. The resulting pedestrian script is however isn't and ultimately banal with a weak payoff. The play has actually very little to say about global warming.
Will Lyman, the voice of Frontline and Boston's best underworked actor, seen recently as Claudius on the Common, makes a convincing senior scientist, driven to a desert hideaway by academic politics over his controversial ideas and a family tragedy. Amy Russ plays the perennial student of indeterminate years, juvenile because of her lowly academic position. Unfortunately her underwritten role becomes monotonous, dependent on superficial charm and bumptiousness. While Lyman has a deliberate depth to his performance, her's becomes tedious and not very believable. The two sometimes seem to be in two different plays not written by the same author. Too many of her actions are plot devices, from finding his diary in Antartica while there on an punitive Outward Bound visit to finally "getting" the significance of his research. Director David Zoffoli from Merrimack keeps the action going through some fairly dubious passages but ultimately the climax is unconvincing being delivered by mail with a final spotlit scene.
The New Rep production is good-looking with an effective realistic set by architect Alan Joslin, well lit by David Parichy who's worked with Zoffoli in Lowell. Molly Trainer's costumes done for two people in one setting suggest their academic lack of concern for fashion. David Kahn's passing thunder storm and incidental Southwestern local radio cuts add to the verisimilitude. Supporting new scripts is an important though risky part of today's regional theatre. This one has been done by San Francisco's Magic Theatre and at the Phoenix in Indianapolis. The New Rep presented Philadelphian Thomas Gibbon's "Permanant Collection" in 2004 also under the auspices of the same National New Play initiative. They'll present Austin Pendleton's "Orson's Shadow", which they read successfully in 2003 later this season. It's been seen in NYC and its suburbs.
"The Ice Breaker" by David Rambo, Oct. 25 - Nov. 19
New Repertory Theatre at Arsenal Center for the Arts
321 Arsenal St. Watertown , (617) 923 - 8487
New Repertory Theatre
posted by will at 3:29 PM
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