Love Bombing After the Earthquake

Demetri Vacratsis's Love Bombing After the Earthquake is not intentionally timely; there is no sense of Breathe Art Theatre Project capitalizing on recent global devastation. The predominant theme is grief — as much as these characters' environment has seen little rebuilding, the arrest and dysfunction in their emotional states are far more troublesome. The original script, also directed by Vacratsis, methodically digs into the ruins of four survivors to find whatever gasping, pulsing motivation remains to drive their damaged decisions.

The play starts with a bang, which grows into a rumble. In a precursor to a production filled with unsettling sounds, the four actors use the furniture and the concrete floor to simulate an earthquake to surprising effect. Fast forward one year, to parallel stories that begin as if at the edge of a canvas and creep toward an illuminating center. A wife is dead; a child is dead. A man is detained for questioning, but where and by what authority seems uncertain. A woman abandons everything that remained of her life in favor of perpetual reminiscence. One story appears much more dynamic than the other, but both are essential to the feel of this intense production.

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Mr. Marmalade

The title Mr. Marmalade may be catchy, but make no mistake: this is Lucy's world; everyone else just lives in it. Accordingly, I found the opening moments of the Breathe Art Theatre Project's production misleading. The onstage presence of the title character (Joel Mitchell) before the play even begins suggests that Mr. Marmalade is the focal point, whereas the real omnipresence is four-year-old Lucy (Christa Coulter), the lens through which every stimulus passes.

Essentially, if Lucy's not interested in something, it doesn't exist. In her eyes, her New Jersey home consists of dull, empty walls and grown-up chairs with their backs to her domain. The play's ninety minutes cover less than twenty-four hours of real time, but for Lucy and her play world, timelines bend to her will. The primary challenge in director Kevin T. Young's staging is the unavoidable dissonance between the narrative structure mirroring a four-year-old's attention span and the deep investment in her real-seeming imaginary life. Coulter is sometimes an uncomplicated child, but just as often the preternaturally composed adult Lucy imagines herself to be, and the shifts are fluid, not overt. Young's blurred lines of make-believe and reality lend occasional unevenness (especially the inconsistent use of characters' "play" accents), but also generate an atmosphere of stream-of-consciousness immediacy that ultimately work for Noah Haidle's darkly comic script.

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