[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of CIL Production’s Coney Island Land or The Great Existential Actuality at The End of The Universe, by Timothy Braun, directed by Lucy Smith Conroy, at the Theatre 68 Arts Complex (The Emerson) in North Hollywood.
A post-pandemic Memorial Day weekend in Coney Island. Two long-lost lovers. Teenagers when they last saw each other 30 years ago at their high school prom. The prom that was supposed to be a magical night for them both. But, in the end, the only magic was in the disappearance of the boy as he performed the first of what was to become a long list of swift exits.
But the pandemic did something weird to us all didn’t it? It made us more brazen, less inhibited, and far too willing to risk everything for anything….
So after a Facebook friend request and several months of online exploration of what might have been, the never-married man and the married with two children woman finally meet…with all the anticipation built up over the last 30 years of longing. The old resentments, fears, guilt and hyper idealized sexual fantasies feeding this triste make them both absolutely terrified. Understandably. And as they try to unwind from all this anxiety-induced ball of razor wire, it becomes a question of not why they still love each other but rather whose fault it is that they gave up 30 years ago and now find themselves at a potentially disastrous crossroads because of it. Particularly for the married with two kids among them.
And so we travel through this slow unraveling with them. The tension, the bitterness, the longing, the love, the urges to leap into each other’s arms and the urges to run. What would any of us do if faced with a very real possibility of a re-do? An answer to the really big ‘what if.’ And we all have one of those don’t we?
A story like this one can only come down to one thing…after the writing of course. The cast. If there’s no chemistry there’s nothing. If the audience senses for one millisecond that these two people on stage could never have been in love, could never have been unable to live without each other, if only in their dreams, then it’s all over. Luckily for us though the two actors in question, Tate Evans and Thomas Piper, are steaming. They have so much chemistry I felt at times like I should look away. I didn’t of course, for fear of missing one sublime glance between them. One brush of a hand or heaven forbid a kiss or two. Or the moment when they know what will happen next and so then would we. You might imagine that when she opens the door to the hotel room and he’s standing there, leaning against the door jam, bottle in hand that the bed is the very first place they will visit. But it takes them much longer to get there than that and the years between them seem like an invisible barrier they must push their way through before there could ever be any kind of consummation.
This was once real love. Deep and stormy and utterly consuming. When it died they were bereft and that takes effort and determination grace to get passed. Even when there’s such deep and divine need for it.
Tate Evans and Thomas Piper make these characters so real, so totally believable that I’m still left wondering how this story ends. They twist and turn and literally dance around each other. They joust with their regrets, their pain, their fear of failure and betrayal and of losing absolutely everything.
Who’s risking more, they wonder. The commitment-phobic seriously single hansom travel writer with a heart to break or the mother of two, planet-saving activist with a dull marriage and a heart to heal?
Coney Island is an intoxicating play. Beguiling, maddening, visceral and achingly truthful.
The hotel room becomes their life, together and apart and, when her husband calls again and again and she answers, we wonder how anything good can come of going back in time like this. Even if it’s for this kind of love.
It’s a beautifully written and brilliantly acted piece. Simple direction, lightly tremulous even, giving these wonderful actors the room they need to find each other over and over again. By the end of the play, I felt almost unable to sit in my seat, such was the tumult and the hope and the duality and the incompleteness. Do you ever remember someone from long ago and ache for them without really understanding why? Is it them you ache for or who you were with them, or the time passed, or the wisdom to choose better?
Maybe we all need a few days in Coney Island…now that’s a thought!
Coney Island plays till March 17 at Theatre 68 and I think you should go…as soon as you possibly can in fact. I bloody loved it!
25% discount code exclusively for NoHo Arts District! Use code: NOHO25
Tickets:
https://www.onstage411.com/newsite/show/play_info.asp?show_id=6434
Where:
Theatre 68 Arts Complex – The Emerson
5112 Lankershim Blvd. North Hollywood, CA 91601
When:
Runs through March 17
Friday 8:30pm
Saturday 8:30pm
Sunday 2:30pm