- OTHER MEDIA
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- SF Bay Guardian January 28, 2009 (Robert Avila)
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- Spare Stage brings the U.S. premiere of Michael Frayn's upbeat but
subtly pensive 1993 comedy — about a young English couple embarking
on the renting and furnishing of their first apartment — to a safe
landing, more or less under the radar, at the Exit's intimate Stage Left
black box. The company's third production (its last was Stephen Dietz's
Private Eyes) again proves lean and competent, marred only by a passing
sightline issue (when the characters take to their low-lying bed) and some
occasional strain detectable beneath otherwise respectable London accents.
Frayn (author of the historically grand yet quirkily human dramas Copenhagen
and Democracy, as well as the exquisite farce-within-a-farce, Noises Off)
excels at exploring the imperfect balance in life between chaos and order.
In Here, he evokes much of the strain and confusion love brings in the
wake of its supposed harmonizing of interests and personalities, with hilarious
attention to quotidian logic as well as the vagaries of memory and time.
Director Stephen Drewes focuses shrewdly on the lovers' familiar yet guarded,
playful yet worrying dialogue — charmingly rendered with understated
emotional precision by Sarah Eismann and Aaron Murphy — as their relationship
is stirred to a neurotic boil by an intrusive landlady (Annie Larson, gracefully
eschewing caricature) who foists on them baggage, and furniture, of her
own. (Avila
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