Waiting to Go
Review of Another Kind of Holding On by Thandiwe Genevieve Scott
The Circle Theatre Festival is underway in the shiny new AMT Theatre on West 45th Street. Twelve daring new plays are on offer promising new takes on old musicals, collections of one acts and lots of groundbreaking, experimental work from the ever expanding marginalia of the theatre community.
Genevieve Scott wrote and stars in Another Kind of Holding On, described by the festival as a time-bending, existential two-hander about memory, regret, and the version of ourselves we leave behind—or fail to.
The play begins with a promising movement interlude of sorts where a young couple, (Scott and Bart Elliot,) perform to some funky sound design. The spell is broken when the play itself begins, and we are led by the hand into the studio sized uncertainty of the play itself. This young couple, we learn, has been in this tiny studio apartment for so long they no longer remember why, or when either of them physically left, or where the apartment even is. All we know is they seem to love each other and are for the most, part happy with this arrangement, cheerful even as they decide to get married (via Zoom.) She tears through the wardrobe looking for the right dress to wear as they deliberate what they do and don’t remember, then decides to make a cake with whatever ingredients she can find in the off-stage kitchen. What they do eat every day becomes a mystery when it is mentioned that they haven’t used any flour or sugar since he made her pancakes two years ago.
We are in Beckett country now.
The set and prop choices add little in the way of clarity, as a shoddy cardboard cell phone and laptop seemed a deliberate choice until compared with a real record player. During the process of arranging their impromptu, virtual wedding each character is dispatched to the creatively staged shower in turn so the other can have a moment alone to have a phone call in one case and read a letter aloud in the other. These missives do however beg the question, “Ok, so the rest of the world is out there and living seemingly normal lives, so what’s up with these two?”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved allegory.
My best guess is we are being led to believe that they are a couple stuck in a rut, living in the past – a past they don’t even seem to remember clearly. So much so that they seem incapable of even conceiving leaving this situation; this rundown apartment, even though they are no longer the two people who entered it long ago (when he was late for the viewing with the real estate agent, a detail she brings up repeatedly for someone who can’t remember what, if any, food there is in the fridge.)
On the one hand, perhaps this kind of experimental, theatrical calisthenics is what festivals are all about. On the other, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if the festival itself offered some dramaturgical guidance to tease out a first draft’s potential just a little bit?
