‘Sunday’ – review by Elyse Trevers
What is your defining moment, the moment that truly made you who you are? That is the most intriguing idea raised in in “Sunday,” the new play by Jack Thorne (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”) Alice, one of the characters, sometimes sits above the stage in a cut-out window to give background on each of the characters.
Directed and choreographed by Lee Sunday Evans, the play features a group of 20-somethings who meet monthly as a book group which Alice (Ruby Frankel) suggests was started as a “post-ironic joke.” Although they meet to discuss the Anne Tyler classic “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” they actually do little analysis of the book. In fact, the get- together seems more like an excuse for drinking and doing drugs.
Although Alice tries to keep them on course, they veer off in different directions. When Keith (Christian Strange) first enters, he asks an ethical question through a hypothetical situation, asking them to describe how their younger selves would have behaved. It is an interesting idea but would have been more effective had the characters been older. As Alice notes “I’m 22 – just got out of childhood.”
Milo, the unacknowledged leader, went to private school with Keith, a scholarship student. Milo and Alice grew up together and he is dating Jill who is in publishing. Late to the group, Marie is Jill’s roommate and the pivotal character of the play but she doesn’t seem to fit in. (“Why am I a pineapple when everyone around me is an egg.”)
Though Marie has an interesting back story, it is not revealed to us until much later. The character is listless and weak as she mopes her way through the play. Perhaps her demeanor would have been more meaningful had Alice told us about her sooner. Marie’s story continues after the others have left the stage at the end of the book group. She has trouble sleeping and gets a late-night visit from the downstairs neighbor who has a crush on her.
Despite an occasional nice phrase and strong performances by Alice and the downstairs neighbor Bill (Maurice Jones), the play is extremely tedious and slow. The characters complain about boredom but that’s how I felt sitting through much of it. Thorne throws out some interesting ideas, specifically our “relation with the mistakes we made in the past.”
It’s hard to feel anything for the characters or to care about them. I’m not sure if it was because of the writing or the acting. The characters appear unmoored, unhappy and bored. They are filled with ennui and disenchantment. Intermittently, they dance, stretch and move about but there’s no context for it.
Although the running time was noted as 90- minutes, the performance I attended seem to drag on. Afterward, I realized that the cast had managed to prolong it to 2 hours. Perhaps they wished to remain onstage since it was actually the show’s final performance.
My book group meets monthly. We don’t dance or do drugs (although there is some wine.) We do discuss the books and sometimes we even relate personal experiences. “Sunday” was disappointing since Thorne doesn’t have a clear focus. However, I did get something from it, a suggestion. Next month we may read Anne Tyler’s, “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.”
