Theater Review–

Free Production, Bearing Talent, Is Normal For New Group

By Julie Stern

Here in the suburban land of the perpetual carpool, many of us have come to regard the automobile as the setting for deep meaningful interpersonal communication. With our kids buckled firmly in the back seat (where we couldn’t see each other’s facial expressions) our family must have logged thousands of miles between home, school, soccer field and birthday parties, sharing ideas and feelings about religion, politics, education and the meaning of life.

Playwright Neil LaBute’s take on the subject is clearly different. His fascinating and delightful play Autobahn uses its title as a metaphor: solitary hermetically sealed vehicles speeding along an endless highway, in spiritual and emotional isolation. As presented by Normal Theater Company, it consists of six short plays, each involving two people sitting in the front seat of a car, Mr LaBute’s opus is about the total failure to communicate. The dramatic irony linking them  together is the way the audience understands perfectly what is going on, while the characters themselves remain clueless.

The recently-formed theater company presented a pair of performances of this work last weekend at Mocha Coffee House in Sandy Hook. For the next two weekends, the company will again present pairs of free performances, first at A Common Ground in Danbury (October 12-13) and then at Thomaston Opera House (October 19-20).

The work opens with “Funny” in which a tight-lipped, expressionless Michelle Duncan is an elegantly dressed mother, grimly ferrying her motor-mouthed daughter (Jenny Schuck) back from another stint in a rehab program.

In “Merge,” Duncan becomes a shrewdly vacuous wife fending off the questions of her confused husband (Timothy Huebenthal) as to exactly what happened during her out of town business seminar that would lead her to end up naked on the floor of her hotel room.

In “Long Division,” Dan Chen sits in slumped despair as his fast talking buddy (Peter McGee) orders him to go retrieve his Nintendo 64 from his ex-girlfriend’s apartment.

This leads up to the best of the playlets, the droll “Bench Seat” in which the feckless Chen, as a University Graduate Teaching Fellow, opens up a can of worms when he takes Schuck, a pretty townie with unexpected depths of resentment, up to a scenic romantic trysting spot.

Ms Duncan and Mr Huebenthal return in “All Apologies,” in which a husband with anger management issues is attempting to justify his public abuse of his wife, by blaming it on the history of language.

The sixth play, “Road Trip,” is a chilling portrayal of a pederastic teacher who has lured a young high school girl into running away with him. Peter McGee is the tightly wound driver education instructor, tightening his coils around the air-headed Samantha Kaufman, as she babbles on about the relative merits of Burger King vs McDonald’s.

What is absolutely amazing about this production — which includes two additional plays —is how good it is. This show deserves to be seen by more people, who ought to be paying money for the privilege. The acting is so polished, and the direction so crisp, that it seems a shame to stop after only six performances.

The Normal Theater was founded by Jenny Schuck, who, with Tim Huebenthal co-directed Autobahn. Her aim is to establish a locally based company of professionally trained actors, dedicated to performing serious theatrical works. With this as an opener, I can’t wait to see what they do next.