All new people

Mixed-up feelings about this play translating our Y Generation's mal de vivre

From being an actor to evolving on other artistic stages, like becoming a playwriter, it’s normal in the USA because everything is possible, thank you dear “American Dream”.

From that to saying that the result will be a masterpiece is another thing.

Knowing that the TV series actor Zach Braff is the playwriter of “All new people” doesn’t add anything to the plot. About the youth, (he was 36 years old in 2011 when he wrote it), Zach offers us a (too) long – almost two hours – performance, with five pretty good actors and nice technical stage effects but a rather flat and unstitched script.

Pity, because there is quite some potential, yet not fully exploited. Using the TV shows’ tricks to foster easy laugh, it works on let’s say 70% of the audience, quite a score, for his first an so far only play.

Is it that I have been too big of a TV series’ consumer that I sober up facing the technical gimmicks? or is it that I have been lucky to see really subtile and foxy plays in the past? I disagree with the majority of the public who seemed to have enjoyed “All new people” yesterday night.

To make up your mind, there will be two other shows, coming up next week:

Monday 18th April, 8 pm and Wednesday 20th April, 8 pm with an optional introduction to the play by Janine Goedert at 7.30pm before every performance (in English). More infos here.

Plot:

It is the dead of winter, and the summer vacation getaway of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, is desolate and blanketed in snow. Charlie is 35, disillusioned and suicidal, and needs some time away from the rest of the world. The island ghost-town seems to be the perfect escape and certainly the perfect spot to say “Goodbye, cruel world”. He is having a last cigarette, when his exit is rudely interrupted by the flustered appearance of Emma, an overexcited and drug-loving young Englishwoman, who is survival-jobbing as an estate agent. And she will not be the last uninvited guest. A motley parade of misfits show up and change the grumpy and moody suicide candidate’s plans: a hired beauty, the town fireman (also acting as the bourgeois’ drug dealer during the summer months) and the eccentric Brit desperately trying to stay in the country. The most un-related people find themselves thrown together in a beach house (that belongs to none of them) where the mood is anything but sunny…

 

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