Play Leads Audience to the Verge of a New Century
By Judy King - Valley Journal
Looking for an antidote to the millennial jitters? You'll find it in the Thunder River Theatre Company production of "On The Verge."
Written in 1888, Eric Overmyer's play, subtitled "The Geography of Yearning," calms our qualms about what lies over the 2000 horizon by taking us on a whimsical flight of fancy into the past, when our present loomed as the future, "unmapped and unnamed. Distant visas shining. You must not shrink. You must embrace it with all your heart."
A pair of dramatically engaging and intellectually stimulating themes are richly interwoven in a plot combining the adventures of three eccentric female explorers with a witty speculation on the effects of time travel as they are catapulted from their late-Victorian era to the middle of the 20th Century.These three characters are composite figures because they are loosely based on real women who traveled, usually solo, to distant and dangerous lands in the last decades where Terra Incognita still existed.
Each character , however, is distinctly drawn and each is uniquely amusing and endearing. They are disparate ages, a difference manifest in their responses both to the mores of their own time and to those of the future they find while trekking through an unexplored jungle.As Mary, eldest of the trio, Julia Whitcombe portrays a spunky lady who, although she abides by the conventions of her time and social class, forges ahead to the future with a receptivity made plausible by the subtlety and skill of Whitcombe's performance.
In the role of Alexandra, youngest of the trio, Valerie Haugen is wonderfully funny depicting an adventurous young woman given to raptures and rhymes which put her out of step with her own time but very much in tune with the future which she absorbs with abandon.
Between Mary and Alexandra in age is Bonnie Cobb's robust Fanny, a Victorian matron cum world explorer with vital appetites and ardent yearnings. Cobb brings energy and humor to her portrayal of a plucky and sensuous lady whose high energy is matched by her good nature, whose curiosity is equaled by her hearty willingness to take a risk.The trio's adventures are punctuated by visitations from a string of characters who represent cultural icons from the yeti to Mr. Coffee. Tim Rafelson plays these eight parts with great verve and a pro's ease with caricature.
He is accomplished at accents and very funny in all the roles, each depicted in perfect pitch, from a fortune telling Madame Nhu to Nicky Paradise, the slick, slang-slinging owner of a 1950's nightclub whose jive talk intrigues the rhyme-obsessed Alexandra and whose easy flirtatious style proves irresistibly stimulating to the still yearning Fanny. This play is a treat which you should not deny yourself this historic holiday season, as we stand with the one character who chooses to travel into the future beyond the Fifties. Beckoned by words and phrases like "computer, quasars, Rumanian cabernet sauvignon," Mary is poised to take the plunge into the unknown on which the millennial audience, like it or not, is joining her.