Also this issue:

Music Man
James Sugg finds songwriting method amid madness.
-Juliet Fletcher

Coming Out of the Dark
A move into white for Thomas Chimes and vibrant work from Stuart Netsky light up Locks Gallery.
-Robin Rice

Preston Foerder
-Debra Auspitz

Curtis Opera Theatre's French Comic One Acts
-David Shengold

River North Chicago Dance Company
-Janet Anderson

Funky Junk Auction/Bike Parts Art Raid
-Debra Auspitz

City of Angels
-David Anthony Fox

The Tempest
-Toby Zinman

April 10-16, 2003

theater

Fiction

by Toby Zinman

As the lights went down on the final scene of Fiction, the woman behind me said, quite loudly, "Cute." And that was a generous response to this world premiere of a new play by Steven Dietz (Lonely Planet). This tale about marriage, death and writing is contrived, pretentious and exasperatingly "cute," with acting to match. You don’t believe anybody for a second.

Michael (Robert Cuccioli) and Linda (Laila Robins) meet cute in a Paris café. There is a long, over-animated conversation about which rock song is the best, which made me feel that I never wanted to hear another word from these shallow, posturing people who speak only in elaborate metaphors, much less spend the next two hours with them. But, there we were, learning that after 20 years of marriage, Linda has three weeks to live. They are both novelists, and have kept diaries their entire lives. She asks him to read her journals after she dies, and asks to read his before she dies. She discovers The Other Woman (Marianne Hagan).

There are cruelties involved in these decisions -- and in the very predictable final twist -- that took my breath away, although neither the characters nor the playwright seemed to think that discovering immense betrayals was such a bad parting gesture. Well, actually, nobody seemed to much care about dying either, so there you go. One of the problems created by having artists as characters in plays is that you have to demonstrate their art; a canvas can remain coyly hidden from the audience, but a writer's writing has to sound as if there's some substance there; what Dietz has supplied is overwritten cliché, where no one ever stops being a character and starts sounding human.

The play's central image is of a place off the Cape of Good Hope in Africa where there is a line in the water where "two worlds meet." This line is, by extension (and everything is extended analogy in this play), the line between truth and lies ("Remember, baby, the lies begin when we lift the pen"). What Dietz seems to have forgotten is the line between fiction and drama, and since almost all of this play is merely narrated, there is very little theatricality involved.

The three actors move woodenly between chair and table; Robins smiles all the time (OK, OK, be brave, but don't we ever get to see the woman who is dying?) and says snarky things to her creative writing students ("my young friend of ambiguous gender"). Hagan never smiles. Cuccioli waves his hands in insufferable "faux humility." The wit remains at the level of "I don't like to write. I like to have written."

As the lady said, "Cute."

Fiction

Through April 13, McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, N.J., 609-258-2787.