50 min | Comedy, Travelogue | Mature
Brooklyn-based playwright and Fringe veteran Martin Dockery overlays a trip to Chernobyl, Geoff Dyer’s book Zona, and the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky into a solo show about the search for human creativity. All three of these pieces are quests in one way or another to find the heart of this creativity, and perhaps of art itself. The play sets these pieces into motion, and then weaves back and forth among them in a mega-quest to attempt to do the same for the audience.
I enjoy the idea of a play that flouts conventionality, that has no obvious beginning, ending, or story arc. I can get with that. Yet in practice, the play is torrential and ephemeral at once, and its lack of structure veers dangerously close to disarray, depending almost entirely on the performer’s force of personality to carry the audience’s journey. Dockery is certainly a charismatic guide, keeping the audience in rapt attention as the skeptical and slightly incredulous navigator through the trip, the book, and the film. His enthusiasm is almost able to compensate for the fact that the play as a whole doesn’t quite add up to more than the sum of its anecdotes and images.
Dockery steers you close to great themes: we catch glimpses of the human desire for inspiration, and the mystery of the creative spark with all the potential and danger it brings. But just like the characters in Stalker, Dockery constantly circles them without ever diving in too deeply. The play seems to rely on suggestion alone to converse with these bigger questions. Ambitious in scope, but in the end transient, our journey into The Exclusion Zone is an interesting, though not entirely satisfying, exploration of the human heart.
The Exclusion Zone by Martin Dockery is playing at Café Nostalgica (601 Cumberland Street) on Friday, June 17 at 7:30pm; Saturday, June 18 at 6:00pm; Sunday, June 19 at 1:00pm; Monday, June 20 at 6:30pm; Tuesday, June 21 at 8:00pm; Thursday, June 23 at 9:30 pm; Friday, June 24 at 10:30pm; Saturday, June 25 at 7:30pm; Sunday, June 26 at 5:30pm.
Tickets are $12.
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