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They smoke weed and exchange silly gifts.
They stare out into the glittering cosmos of city lights.
They imagine their successful, perfect futures.
You could be forgiven for expecting them to burst intoOur Time.
If the moment feels like a bit of a trope, it also feels truthful.
Its title?This Room Is Full of Rooftops.
Its sincere, with a bighearted commitment from its actors.
Gameness isnt a problem.
Lack of an engine, however, is.
Rosenbergs play accumulates, but it doesnt build.
Its many too many scenes come dutifully one after another, with more feeling of inevitability than revelation.
Aint that the truth.
Its not that there needs to be an alien attack or a sudden, shocking reveal.
Inevitability isnt necessarily a flaw onstage, if the elastic, porous possibilitiesof the stageare being taken advantage of.
The point is to make the familiar fearfully and wonderfully strange.
(Hes a transfer student, new not only to the improv gang but to the whole school!
This is extra-convenient for exposition.)
you might probably guess how it goes, and how it ends.
It lets us sit in a too-comfortable place of maturity over them.
He does, at least, give them variety.
(ItsSweeney Todd, and the uncontainable theater-kid delirium isreal.)
And then there are the weirdos: Zeke (Jawuan Hill) and Jeanna (Ema Zivkovic).
Thank goodness for the weirdos.
(Here and always.
Is it a truthful scenario?
You show up and you stand on line on the sidewalk.
You get to pick a treat out of a milk crate while you wait (Toblerone?
Inside, you nestle on folding chairs in two long rows, facing each other across an aisle.
Benito, the bodega cat, wanders through.
Joan of Arc in a Supermarketisnt quite a comedy.
In the playwrights note, Xtina describes it as a horror piece.
There are wildfires crackling on the horizon and something nasty in the woodshed.
And as Frances makes her way down the highway, the smoke thickens.
But the show is, at times, inarguably funny.
Theres a chattery, freewheeling humor to the scenes with the supermarkets current employees.
(Hey, Gretchen, she pants with grinning, demonic energy.
Guess what I did with this kiwi?
I rubbed it on my fucking neck!)
Most weirdly endearing of all, theres the bespectacled, homeschooled nerd.
How was your weekend?
The weather was really nice, so I thought about going to the beach.Beat.Yep, thats it.
Ultimately, Xtinas play is a kind of exorcism of trauma.
The question is, what was/is it, and will they escape it, and how?
If this sounds a little foggy, well, it is.
Xtina especially in Francess curlicuing speeches leans a bit too heavily on a kind of quasi-poetic hinting at circumstance.
Description of sensation is paramount, rather than through-line of action.
I am mine but I am also
yours.
When the former is at its best, it can yield real poetry and high, delicate theatricality.
There are fluids and juices involved.
It can start to get lost in the seductive labyrinth of self, self, self.
Other times, it stays stuck in the maze.
What do we discover?
Well, we figure out that the boss is much lessthis Boband much morethis one.
The something unspeakable that Frances has experienced, however, remains … unspoken.
But what you cant quite do isfeelthat final, gripping rush of tension and release.
What Else Is True?is at A.R.T.
