Plus 30 NYC

The Red Fern Theater Company had an interesting fancy: plays that show how New York City might be in 30 years. They presents seven of them, each engaging in its own way, in +30 NYC - thru March 21 at Center Stage. There is a diversity of depths in terms of believability and reality in the writing and acting from trying to be funny as in a sitcom to a sense of truth. Most of the actors are quite good, and all are enthusiastic. But with seven writers and six directors, what's missing is consistency of style in performance. It runs from presentational shrieking in one play to a solid sense of reality in another, as in the performance of the totally believable Corinna May in Thirty Story Masterpiece by Tommy Smith, directed by Jessi D. Hill.

Themes are: styles of living, romance, cryo-preservation, taller buildings with smaller apartments, pollution, global warming, etc. All the plays foresee a negative future -- no joy or happiness or fulfillment extrapolated ahead as a result of conditions today.

Most interesting (and sometimes incomprehensible because of shotgun delivery of strange words) is In the Zone by Michael John Garcés, directed by Portia Krieger, which creates its own futuristic slang (as per "A Clockwork Orange") in a hungry, flooded world where sex is cyber, where an actual book is of great value. It's well performed by Richard Gallagher, Nalini Sharma, Maria-Christian Oliveras, and the dynamic Ian Quinlan.

This entire project was a bold undertaking obviously carried out with energy and care by a large group of talented hard-working Theatre people, and, as a totality, quite successful as an experimental evening of Theatre. I look forward to Red Fern's next undertaking.