- OTHER MEDIA
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- Powerful actors give this 'Man' strength
- SF Chronicle July 15, 2005 (Robert Hurwitt)
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- The tension ebbs and flows with pregnant comedy as we wait for the
woman on the train to open a book. Expectancy reaches almost excruciating
levels in the richly elongated moments before her male fellow passenger
realizes what she's reading.
- Ken Ruta and Abigail Van Alyn play Yasmina Reza's "The Unexpected
Man" with virtuosic brio in the Spare Stage production that opened
Friday at Exit Theatre.
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- Ruta, an American Conservatory Theater mainstay for much of its first
30 years, nails the world-weariness and prickly vanity of the aged, famous
novelist from the moment he spits out his first word, "Bitter."
Van Alyn, long a leading actress on many local stages, epitomizes the quandary
of the intelligent, attractive and dedicated older reader who finds herself
alone on a train with the favorite author whose latest book is in her handbag.
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- With Reza's "Art" still cropping up everywhere, it's a wonder
it's taken so long for "Man" - a London hit in 1998 (with Michael
Gambon and Eileen Atkins) - to get a decent Bay Area staging. It had a
disappointing local premiere in Lafayette in 2005, but it takes actors
of this caliber to negotiate Reza's cagily meandering interior monologues
in Christopher Hampton's typically incisive translation.
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- Stephen Drewes, co-founder of the year-old Spare Stage, gives it a
perhaps too spare staging on a two-bench set a bit too redolent of "Zoo
Story." There are moments where he could provide more variety to the
alternating monologues, as we wait to see whether these two people will
ever actually speak to each other. But on the whole, his apparent decision
to give Ruta and Van Alyn free rein pays off beautifully.
- "Man" is a play about nothing and everything, a comic-poignant
drama of missed or possible connections negotiated through the trenchant,
dyspeptic, profound and banal musings of two strangers on a train. Reza's
text is rich in unexpectedly low-key delights. Drewes' production mirrors
that quality with the chance to catch two masterful performances up-close
and personal in the Exit's intimate space.
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