Photo by Rebecca Chiappone
Reviewed by Amanda Halkiotis
Writer/performer Penny Pollak plays two young girls with a flair for the dramatic in No Traveler. The first attempts to validate her existence in her recently-remarried father’s life by pretending to end it, only to wind up in purgatory. She has the chance to rejoin the living, but only if she can talk another suicidal girl out of making a similar decision.
If only the writing were as dramatic: instead, it gets bogged down by the thematic darkness and by Pollak’s unconvincing acting. Her first role consists of flippant confidence and grating pay-attention-to-me amateur acting, an overdone and one-dimensional portrayal of a petulant daddy’s girl. As the second girl, who fawns over the romance of suicide, she is simply naïve and whiny, far from the seriousness of death and the level of sadness she claims to be feeling.
The melodramatic monologues don’t help her as writer or performer: they’re a bunch of clichés, from the jealousy caused by a young new stepmother to the trauma of being abused by a mother’s new boyfriend. Wracked by a silence alternated by screams and sobs, trapped in a dimly lit theater, the audience loses sympathy and instead begins to hope that they simply end it and go straight to hell.
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No Traveler (50 minutes)
Under St. Marks Theater (94 St. Marks Place)
Tickets: $12; Students and Seniors $9
Performances: Saturday 3/6 @ 5:30pm
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