Yahoo News 46 Beacon, theatre review: Pithy start deflates into long, laboured seduction
Bill Rosenfield wants us to believe that July 8th 1970, the evening he describes in this two-hander, was a life-changing moment for his characters.
Unfortunately this one-night stand doesn’t merit the retrospective reflection with which the play is bookended; it’s very hard to believe that the pair would still be mulling on it in the present day.
46 Beacon is an address in Boston – although it could just as well be Bolton, for all the sense of place that’s given – and Robert (Jay Taylor) is an English actor trying his luck States-side.
On the night in question, he invites back to his room gauche young – very young – high school student Alan (Oliver Coopersmith), who is connected in some unspecified way with the theatre at which Alan is working. The script, nicely pithy in the first few minutes of Alexander Lass’s production, deflates into a long, laboured seduction scene.
The ticks of the writing quickly become irksome: the dialogue settles into a stilted pattern of question and answer, in which one of them repeats the last thing the other said, but reframing it as a question. It’s akin to the constant irritating buzz of a mosquito. A mosquito? Yes.
Until April 29, Trafalgar Studios 2; atgtickets.com
