When Is a Clock

Photo/Kyle Ancowitz

Matthew Freeman's new play When Is a Clock is begging to be reset. At its heart, there's an ornate metaphysical mystery (something of a cross between Paul Auster and Jorge Luis Borges), with the sort of creepy poetry that allows dandruff to be described as "shavings . . . like someone put a little cheese grater to his milky skull" and a woman's transformation into a clock as "Her legs curled up inside her, her arms wrapped backwards, her head lowered into her widening neck. All of this sounds so . . . thundering and bizarre. But it was graceful. Like origami." But around this well-fashioned analog core, there's a slick, winking digital comedy that seems like effluvium from Mr. Freeman's recent, pointed one-acts (Trayf and The White Swallow). A clock can track both night and day, but When Is a Clock would keep better time if it excised the shallow office scenes, toned down the exaggerated cop, and focused on the family drama. (Don't get me wrong: I like Freeman's talented usual suspects, Matthew Trumbull and David DelGrosso, but here, they are more distracting than helpful.)

Just to be clear, Gordon (Tom Staggs) describes himself as such: "I bloom. I molt. I get well. I get ill." When his wife, Bronwyn (Tracey Gilbert), suddenly vanishes, it's not a total surprise: Gordon is soft, and he has raised his idiotic son, Alex (Beau Allulli) to be the same; as he puts it, he's not even strong enough to be abusive. However, these-grand-scheme-of-things declarations ("I decided, then and there, then and there, that I was going to be in love with her") are at odds with Gordon's decisive quest to find his wife, a chronologically fragmented romp through Pennsylvania. They also don't match up with Gordon's affairs; Lucy (Megan Tusing) points out, after she's had a "towel laid under her ass," that he doesn't even bother to hide the ring. Nor do they match with the way Staggs plays the role -- how (or really, why) a milquetoast like him goes about picking up underage girls is beyond me.

Bronwyn, on the other hand, has significantly more development: she longs for change, not just in her routine life, but in her own physical body. ("I'll always have only my eyes. My hands. My wrists.") As a result, she is drawn to the creepy, soft-spoken Sean (Ian Gould, who makes the role a bit too childish), the metaphorical and actual other man who is able to transform her into a clock. Unfortunately, many of these key scenes are set behind a scrim that's never transparent enough. I'd say that Kyle Ancowitz chooses this staging to represent moments that happen outside Gordon's narrative voice, except that scenes between Alex and the Cop operate without any such illusion. What's more, while these lines read well in a script, on stage, shuffled between off-handedly comic moments, it's easy to miss Bronwyn's lack of empathy: "If you can't take care of your children, you will not learn how to. If you can't cry when something terrible happens, but you can cry at Kleenex commercials, in the end, you will find yourself empty and cold and that's not something you can decide. [Pause] I cannot do anything. I could not. I could not do anything."

I make these criticisms because, for all that, When Is a Clock is a blast of originality. Mr. Freeman has a strong, richly descriptive voice that is well-served by the stretches of desolate narrative, and the complex ideas at play are the better for all the simple details. At one point, Sean describes the invention of the moving image, a device created from the pure desire to know and capture what is happening. This is what the good playwright does; as he puts it, "We watch things move, because it's impossible." However, the playwright falls into his own trap, for the reverse of that purity is what the moving image became -- simple entertainment -- and with such overt and unnecessary comic scenes weighing down that elegant motion, When Is a Clock is just going around in circles.

Happy Endings

First, and most importantly: yes, there is a happy ending. It's probably not the one you'd expect from a one-act play festival that commissioned nine playwrights to share their take on the sex worker industry, but it's a pretty satisfying evening all the same. There are a few rough spots that -- pardon me -- could've used more lube, by which I mean hard (or soft -- I can't stop!) revisions, the kind that I could have used to prevent this sentence from growing . . . out of control. Luckily, the evening balances between the poetic bookends (Beauty and Yes Yes Yes), absurd slapstick (Pulling Teeth), casual comedy (Switch), and calm drama (Whenever You're Ready). Whether dealing with first-timers (Peep Show), old pros (The Guest), or the dysfunctionally kinky (The White Swallow), there's something for everyone. And given the smart directorial choices regarding ambiance and musical transitions, the whole night's quite engaging.

We open with Blair Fell's Beauty, a voyeur's (David Johnston's) monologued fantasy about the dancer (Joe Curnutte) he watches, a fantasy that, like true beauty, can only live in his mind and at a distance: "Don't risk passion by closeness," he says, and then later, "Beauty is not in actual life, but in memory. Memory you can repair." As the voyeur pours his heart out, we're left to wonder how the dancer -- swerve, swerve, head, head, jiggle, jiggle, pause -- actually sees himself: the answer comes as a rude awakening.

In David Foley's Switch, two plays collide -- a comedy about the ancient art of male prostitution, which the hysterically Italian Massimo (Phillip Taratula) takes very seriously ("I would never be no woman's plaything"), and then more awkwardly a rumination on the scientific work being done on mice to "switch" their genes from homo- to heterosexuality. Problem is, Earl (Adam Rihacek) really just wants to get laid, and so the play, while generating laughs from the former ("What is it like to have men's peepee in your bum?") goes nowhere with the latter.

Christine Whitley's Peep Show takes a quieter approach, using a lot of silence to give us the feeling of true voyeurism. Woman (Laura Desmond) pays Man (Robert Buckwalter), presumably a "talent scout" for a peep show outfit, or possibly just an honest pair of eyes, to look at her, a simple task that becomes an outpouring of need and emotion: "Admire me. Touch me. See me," she pleads, and though she's in a maid's outfit by this point, standing on a block, it's one of the most honest (and highest) points of the night.

Whenever You're Ready, by John Yearley, takes a similar approach, as Man (Carter Jackson) pays a Woman (Tracey Gilbert) for the privilege of sketching her nude. As the woman narrates, speaking interstitially to the audience as the man attempts to draw, we get the first glimpse of the bitterness some of the people in the industry have for their career: this woman is 35 years old, and only now becoming aware of her emotion, finding herself more naked in an ankle or beautiful shoulder than in the body that she has made so easily available, just to shut people up.

Finally, in the last piece of Act I, Matthew Freeman's The White Swallow, audiences get to delight in Matthew Trumbull's brilliantly over-the-top portrayal of a man, Nick, with a very curious fetish. Like another of Freeman's one-acts (Trayf, which largely used the same cast), it's a skit that has been thoroughly grounded by strong lines (that make completely fractured sense) and by his core actors: David DelGrosso, as the innocent, bewildered call-boy, is a great foil for Trumbull, and Laura Desmond, as Nick's wife, is a jagged point that manages not to puncture, but to sharpen the fine edges in this piece. Yes, it's silly: but given the production value, not at all implausible, and that's what makes its ridiculousness work.

The same can't be said of Brian Fuqua's The Guest, but this one's going for playing up familiar tropes in an endearing way, and therefore succeeds whenever it stays in check. The shock value of Link Sailor's (Alexis Suarez's) gear is as superfluous as the dildo he brings; the play works best when it's simply lovers Colin (F. Dash Vata) and Curtis (Brian Fuqua) quibbling over the small things, or drooling over the big thing. At any rate, I've never seen such a amicable three-way; I'd never considered that there could be real love -- or torte -- involved.

Speaking of fresh insight, David Johnston's closer, Yes Yes Yes, returns to the same dancer (or at least the same actor and outfit) as in the first play, only this time to find eroticism in the intellectual, as Man (Jim Ireland) accidentally piques the dancer's interest in his recondite reading: Finnegan's Wake. And why shouldn't a go-go dancer be able to soliloquize about Joyce? It's a great note to leave the theater on.

The few bad notes: Stan Richardson's AIDS Reveal (about what you'd expect from the title, and not much more elegantly done) and Boo Killebrew's Pulling Teeth, both of which seem to suffer from going off topic. In AIDS Reveal, three unrelated groups of people receive the dreaded "I've got HIV, and so might you" phone call, and then go into their heads to discuss it with the audience -- and more awkwardly, each other. Little happens in actuality, as with Pulling Teeth, which is just a bad joke stretched out too far, from the Easter Bunny (Taratula) trying to set a hooking Tooth Fairy (R. Jane Casserly) straight to Mrs. Claus's (Tracey Gilbert's) attempts to live vicariously through the sex lives of those on the "naughty" list. I longed to be surprised by something other than campy cleverness (her group CollaborationTown has that down cold), only to be left with a toothless frown.

I think the moral of Happy Endings is clear: writing about the sex industry got these playwrights trying new positions and getting creative juices flowing, and the refusal to play by the book (I'm not talking about the Kama Sutra) is what makes most of the night so surprisingly real, so honestly funny. Who needs a massage? Go straight for the Happy Endings.