Brilliant Traces Cindy Lou Johnson Pdf Free
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The beginning of Brilliant Traces, now playing at, is wonderfully evocative: A young woman in a wedding dress stumbles into a remote and dilapidated Alaska cabin. Her car broke down some time ago, and she’s been wandering in a blinding whiteout — the kind that disorients and kills — for some time before coming across this, the only inhabited place for miles.
As she circles the room, dazed and jittery, mumbling and uttering non sequiturs, the inhabitant, a man hunched in a blanket, watches in silence. Finally, she collapses.
He slides off the dress and places her carefully on the bed, where she sleeps for two days. You can’t tell at the beginning if this is going to be a crazy comedy or an essentially dark one — or perhaps something more serious than comedy, though you recognize the familiar “two lonely and eccentric people getting to know and feel for one another” trope.
But your hopes are high. Between the bedraggled wedding dress and the satin shoes the man accidentally — or perhaps not — crisps in the oven, you’re expecting lively originality from playwright Cindy Lou Johnson.
It helps that the woman, Rosannah DeLuce, is played by the always intriguing Maggy Stacy, and the man, Henry Harry, given a strong performance by Christian Mast. Despite the name (is she meant to be “of light”?), Stacy’s Rosannah is anything but a sweet ingenue or one of those lost, drifting Ophelia-type heroines. She’s depressed, distressed and coming apart, but Stacy also makes her savvy in some ways — distrustful, smart and constantly evaluating everything she sees and hears.
The Days And Nights Of Molly Dodd
Related Stories. The play runs roughly a hundred minutes, and I was pretty happy during perhaps the first 45 or so, intrigued by the characters and fully expecting there’d eventually be some kind of climax.
But it turns out that Rosannah’s just somewhat dotty. She feels herself disintegrating.
She left her wedding, she explains, because she suddenly perceived all the people in the church, including her groom, as dead (there went my nascent theory that she left because the poor man was unpleasant or abusive). Driving through the storm in her car, she felt she was moving faster than the vehicle, in fact flying ahead of it. Perhaps this means she really does represent light. You have successfully signed up for your selected newsletter(s) - please keep an eye on your mailbox, we're movin' in! This is all very poetic — and the language is sometimes fine, as when Henry describes in detail what happens to a human being caught in a whiteout — but it’s thin gruel for sustaining an entire evening. Brilliant Traces turns out to be the kind of play where the playwright thinks a tear-drenched, self-revelatory monologue near the end can take the place of actual action, change, genuine revelation.
This can be done, but the monologue had better be a doozy: Unfortunately, poor Rosannah just repeats her delusions and sorrows until you start feeling like a therapist trying hard not to tap your fingers impatiently on the arm of your chair or doze off. Then — worse and worse — Henry joins in. The dynamic between the two was interesting when he was a jaundiced and taciturn listener, but now he’s pointing to invisible scars on his arms, on his entire body, and we realize these are the brilliant traces of the title (the phrase comes from a poem by Avah Pevlor Johnson).
He goes on to describe the great tragedy of his life: the death of his three-year-old daughter. But his narrative is completely implausible. If you’ve been around any three-year-olds lately, you’ll know that they’re unlikely to grieve the loss of a tiny tinsel shoe for longer than a minute, particularly if offered a cookie. And now everyone’s sad and you have a kind of wailing duet going on. Perhaps if director Craig A.
Bond and his actors had chosen to underplay or play against some of the grief-saturated moments, the play would have worked better. As it is, it’s a relief to step outside afterward and into the neutral darkness. Brilliant Traces, presented through March 5 by Vintage Theatre Productions, 1468 Daytona Street, Aurora, 303-856-7830,.
Brilliant Traces is many things. It's a stunningly taut drama, a showcase for two experienced actors who are willing to take risks, and a brave combination of extended metaphor and elegiac imagery. Just don't call it a comedy. Because it's being staged at Theatre 99, home of The Have Nots!, director Greg Tavares expects the audience to come in ready to laugh. 'For the first five or 10 minutes, things will be taken as funny,' he says. 'The tension in the room will come from the audience, not the stage.' A few laughs will help to ease that tension, but Tavares is adamant that the show is dark and challenging for the actors.
He adds, 'It's a great theater person's action piece.' The actors have plenty of time over the play's 90-minute length to develop their characters, but they don't get much of a breather. After a few blackouts to create the sensation of passing time, Tavares says that 'the lights go up and they don't go down until the end of the fucking show.' Written by Cindy Lou Johnson, Brilliant Traces tells the story of Henry Harry, a man who has sworn off personal relationships to live hermit-like in an Alaskan cabin. And sleep a lot.
His seclusion is interrupted by the surprise arrival of Rosannah DeLuce, a runaway bride brought in by a blizzard. Like Henry, she wants to escape her responsibilities and get as far away from her loved ones as possible. Johnson has created these two misfits to enable her to write about those times in our adult lives when we want to run away from home, the demands of family life, and the crushing familiarity of the world around us. Henry feels that people are too unpredictable, continually sabotaging his search for a peaceful life. Rosannah finds her friends and relatives too cloying and ultimately harmful. It's not much of a common bond for the two characters to share, but it might just be the start of a strong new connection.
Johnson's play has been around since the late '80s. When Tavares saw Brilliant Traces for the first time at Columbia's Trustus Theatre, it stunned him.
'It was very dramatic, full of tension,' he says. Several years later he played Henry in a Charleston version of the show. Now The Have Nots! Co-founder is directing a play that, he says, 'has stood the test of time. 'It had no great stars to launch it, no Broadway run, but it still gets produced because of the merit of the script,' he says. To bring Rosannah DeLuce to life, Tavares chose 23-year-old CofC graduate Eleanor Hollingsworth, who will be moving to Chicago after the run.
'I wanted to do a project with her before she left,' says Tavares, 'because she brings a smoldering tension to everything she does. She's properly trained but wildly experimental. She'll go anywhere and do anything you ask her to do.' Hollingsworth will be joined by Lee Lewis as Henry. Lewis is well known to Theatre 99 audiences from his work in the comedy groups Doppelganger and Moral Fixation, but he's a fine dramatic actor as well. Chops or not, the director's sure that this production will put Lewis and Hollingsworth through their paces.
Sometimes I Wonder
'These are two giant roles that are not like the actors themselves,' Tavares says. 'The characters' nature are incredibly flawed and unadjusted.
See all 1567 rows on www.motorcyclespareparts.eu. There are things in life they haven't healed from that they want to avoid. They don't want to look at the things that hurt them.'
In real life, Lewis is a psychiatrist at MUSC and the practical opposite of wandering Henry Harry. Tavares occasionally has to remind him how screwed up Henry really is. And Hollingsworth is the kind of worldly woman who'll look you in eye and tell you what she means. Rosannah feels like she's floating above the ground, never centered or content. 'It's a crazy, hard job, but for me, if I don't believe them I don't care,' Tavares concludes. 'The big payoff will be if I believe them. If that happens, then we'll be blown away.'
Expect a dark, intense drama with some comedic moments and a pair of neurotic characters snowed into a cabin with potentially explosive results. But don't expect to relax. If all goes to plan, Tavares hopes that this pressure-cooker play will have audience members gritting their teeth and hanging onto the edge of their seats from beginning to end. 'It's a very tense thing you're watching,' he laughs. 'You'll be paying to get stressed.'