L to R: Ethan Mowery and Steven Brown in Austin Schwartz’s “Chekhov.”
Reviewed by Jeff Baker
Newman University in Wichita presented two short plays written and directed by Alumni: Brenden Schwartz and his twin brother Austin Schwartz, under the umbrella title “Honoring Playwrights.”
The first: Brenden Schwartz’s “Looking For Direction” features Joseph Kiley as the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and recreates a time in his life when Beckett was living in France and driving kids to school. On this drive, he shoots the breeze with eleven-year-old student Andre (Daniel Cubias) as they discuss the game of cricket, directions (they get lost) and life in general. This gives Beckett a chance to expound a bit on life and meaning and literature and we can almost see lightbulbs going off over his head.
As they are in a car for most of the play, movement is conveyed by offstage sound effects and the clever bit of shining a red light on the actors when they come to a red light and a green one when the traffic light changes.
And the double meaning of the title is marvelous!
Most of the characters in the plays were actual historical persons and young Andre would (in later years) recall his rides with Beckett and remember that they usually happily discussed cricket.
And I about fell over when I looked up young Andre Roussimoff and found out what he did in later life!
In Austin Schwartz’s “Chekhov,” we see the last days of Anton Chekhov as he is dying of T.B.
Harrowingly played by Steven Brown, he tells visiting writer Ivan Bunin (Ethan Mowery) that he’s getting better, talks a bit about literature (including his famous dictum that a gun introduced in Scene One must be fired by the end of the play) and insists that a writer must live life and not just live literature.
The acting in both was flawless and I got caught up in the stories. The direction was perfect and near-invisible with every instant of the action and dialogue feeling natural and spontaneous, and the touches like the traffic lights and offstage sound added and did not detract or distract.
I was so caught up in the fictions that I told Steven Brown afterward that I almost worried about shaking his hand after watching his hacking and coughing onstage in the final throes of T.B.
The two plays together take just under an hour to perform and this is an evening’s entertainment that is well worth the playgoer’s time.
Additional performances at Newman University, 3100 McCormick in the Jabara Flexible Theater September 18th and 19th at 7:00pm.
L to R: Joseph Kiley and Daniel Cubias in Brenden Schwartz’s “Looking For Direction.”
authorjeffbaker 