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Saw Heart Shaped Nebula at Shotgun Players today. It was a big relief after their craptastic lead-off for the season, Antigonick. More than that, Heart Shaped Nebula was actually worth seeing.
It was fundamentally a magic realism story about a man who'd lost his true love and how he might be reunited with her. At times I found that overarching story a little heavy-handed. Admitted, there was some nice ambiguity (such as whether the third character was an angel, a thief, or both), but there was also a lot of relatively clichéd romance.
Where the play really excelled was in its characters. They were well-drawn and interesting, and their dialogue was terrific: it blended love and science in a positively Andrea-Barrettesque, and though it went overboard at times, there were also a few sublime moments too. ("You're the center of my universe." "The center of the universe is an enormous black hole!") Two of the three actors (the guy and the angel-thief) were also superb, while the last was good enough.
Overall, it was really nice to get the bad taste of Antigonick out of our mouths, so that we don't keep dreading the return to Shotgun. And, I'd be interested to see what else playwright Orta has done.
It was fundamentally a magic realism story about a man who'd lost his true love and how he might be reunited with her. At times I found that overarching story a little heavy-handed. Admitted, there was some nice ambiguity (such as whether the third character was an angel, a thief, or both), but there was also a lot of relatively clichéd romance.
Where the play really excelled was in its characters. They were well-drawn and interesting, and their dialogue was terrific: it blended love and science in a positively Andrea-Barrettesque, and though it went overboard at times, there were also a few sublime moments too. ("You're the center of my universe." "The center of the universe is an enormous black hole!") Two of the three actors (the guy and the angel-thief) were also superb, while the last was good enough.
Overall, it was really nice to get the bad taste of Antigonick out of our mouths, so that we don't keep dreading the return to Shotgun. And, I'd be interested to see what else playwright Orta has done.