Nervous comedy playing at Rep Stage
Very New York ‘Hunting and Gathering' generally a good fit for the audience
Real estate and romance are intertwined in Brooke Berman's “Hunting and Gathering.” Although it's not a comfortable fit for the anxious characters, it's generally a good fit for the audience in this Rep Stage production.
This 2008 play is a nervous comedy about young adults in New York City who are constantly changing jobs, apartments and lovers. You could say that their inability to settle down is just a sign of how people in their 20s are bursting with sometimes-misdirected energy, but you also could say that high rents and a tight job market play a role.
In any event, you definitely can say that this is such a New York-centered play that its numerous specific references to neighborhoods in the boroughs beyond Manhattan almost make you wish the playbill were accompanied by a street map. Although there are universally applicable insights offered by the play, it doesn't hurt to recognize Park Slope.
The playwright knows this urban terrain so well that “Hunting and Gathering” certainly succeeds as an anthropological exercise; and the four-member cast under director Kasi Campbell brings a lot of emotional conviction to this tightly paced production.
Immediately placing the audience in a suitably unsettled mood is a clever set design by Mollie Singer that mostly consists of cardboard boxes neatly stacked so high that one should talk about them in architectural terms. Indeed, they become the apartment walls for characters who are experts at house sitting and couch surfing.
As the play opens, individual characters step forward and deliver autobiographical monologues that relate valuable personal information while also suggesting that one of their generational problems is that they're so, well, self-absorbed.
These short monologues are sprinkled throughout the intermissionless 100-minute play, but they alternate with dialogue scenes that more or less carry the story forward. It's an effective narrative strategy, but occasionally “Hunting and Gathering” seems to be moving in place.
Without revealing the significance of every change of address, it's safe to say that a central relationship in the play involves two brothers dealing with enough relationship issues to keep the words flying. Astor (Daniel Corey) is something of a free spirit, while Jesse (Rex Daugherty) is more settled in terms of his occupation as a college professor; however, Jesse is recently divorced and far from secure in his amorous behavior.
These brothers have different personalities, to be sure, but it's frankly rather distracting that the two actors playing them have so little physical resemblance. Let's just say they've grown apart and leave it at that.
There are two women who directly figure into their lives in the slices of life we're shown. It's best to discover for yourself how Ruth (Kathryn Tkel) and Bess (Alina Collins Maldonado) are linked to the brothers, but a general observation is that this play is really enjoyable in showing how often individual lives intersect within an otherwise enormous city. Go to a bar in “Hunting and Gathering” and you're likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger who turns out to be not quite a complete stranger.
Berman knows the geography of her city and her characters so well that you never doubt the sociological truth of what you're watching here. Where you might harbor doubt about the play, however, concerns the tendency to hammer home its thematic points about these degrees of homelessness.
Bess, for instance, is a college student who expresses herself so bluntly that even her fellow New Yorkers blush. Although Maldonado's lively performance is completely persuasive, the character herself is prone to say and do things that speak oh so obviously to the script's thematic agenda.
It wouldn't be fair to the audience to spoil the scene in which the play title's reference to hunting is made plain, but you can bet that Bess does not need any shooting lessons in order to hit her targets. The play itself has worthy symbolic targets and sure hits them, and then hits them again and again.
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