Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them,as staged in South Florida by New Theater as part of a rolling world premiere, is a startlingly affective comedy/drama that’s likely to move anyone – to both laughter and tears – who has ever been 12 or 16 years old. The laugh lines, and there are plenty, are warmly funny, and the heartbreak proves almost palpable for more than a few people in the audience in Coral Gables. Credit goes to New Theater artistic director Ricky J. Martinez and his three-person cast of young actors playing far younger characters: 12-year-old Edith (played by Natasha Waisfeld) and her brother, Kenny (Juan Gonzalez Machain) and his friend Benji (John Robert Warren), both 16 and both, like Edith, supersmart.
The boys are the only sophomores in their advanced placement math class. Preteen Edith sees herself as defender of the isolated homestead. Kenny works at organizing the house and putting a positive spin on their situation in an effort to protect Edith from growing up too soon.
Credit, as well, to a lighting effect that drives home the point of A. Rey Pamatmat’s script: At times a player’s shadow is cast upon the backstage wall, growing larger and then shrinking to lifesize as the distance from the light source changes. The giant shadow is an illusion; the characters are kids, not grown-ups, no matter how smart they are or how “grown up” they try to be.
Parents are missing from stage but not from impacting their children’s lives. The mother of Edith and Kenny is dead; their father, a physician, is living with his girlfriend and is always delinquent about putting money into the bank so that the kids – living by themselves in a non-working farm (the play’s setting) far from everything -- can buy food. Benji’s family, never seen, is a big presence in his life.
Some nice touches in the script: crucial distances are measured in walking or driving time, not miles – 30 minutes, 45 minutes; a bittersweet scene in which nerd Benji shows up with a dictionary at Kenny’s place and shares a just-found vocabulary of words that name the sexual urgings and actions that have passed between them; and lots of laughs from lines make the kids sound older than their years and wiser than their elders.
