Fiction
Sometimes fiction is stranger than the truth, especially when a married couple of writers reinvent their lives in the pages of their journals. What is real and what is fantasy becomes a Gordian knot; entangling one woman who acts as their muse into their zinger-laden relationship.
Steven Dietz’s writer-centric play, (if you’re not a writer you won’t appreciate much of the humor), borders on melodrama when Linda (Courtney Sara Bell), a creative writing professor with one breakout novel under her belt, is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. With only three weeks to live, she asks her husband Michael (Darren T. Mangler) if she can read his journals, opening up a Pandora’s Box of trouble.
What she discovers in her husband’s hand is more upsetting than the supposed chemotherapy and surgery she has endured (a simple scarf wrapped her head would aid the illusion). Early in their marriage, during Michael’s struggle overcoming writer’s block, Linda sends him to the same three-month summer colony that inspired her own turbulent memoir set in South Africa.
More intent on clearing out the “negative” energy from a best-selling novelist who stayed in the cottage before him, Michael does everything he can to avoid writing; “I don’t like to write. I like to have written.” There he meets Abby (Carolyn Curtis), a bitter, sharp, camp counselor who challenges him, calling him out as fraud whenever he quotes from Dante—a dig perhaps at unrequited love?
From there, Dietz’s plot complicates the otherwise solid potential in a regurgitated setup by making the husband and wife culprits to their own twisted version of identity theft. Did he have an affair with Abby? It appears later he did, but his fervent denials and abiding affection for his wife suggests otherwise. He is, at the very least, guilty of an ongoing emotional affair (more insidious than purely physical) and ever since his summer with Abby, the pages of his journals further incriminate his fixation on the woman, turning her into a sort of Beatrice to his Dante.
Dietz’s bizarre love triangle jumps the shark when Abby spontaneously visits the couple under the guise of having heard about Linda’s condition. Instead of throwing her out, Linda invites her to stay, flouting Abby under Michael’s nose and appearing seemingly indifferent to the tension.
No one has clean hands in this play. Linda and Abby have their own sordid past they muddle through as Michael learns his own wife was a fraud; this explains why she wrote only one novel.
By the end, it’s difficult to believe anything between these characters or the play itself. The dialogue zips around in witty exchanges that sound like Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward in a tete`-a-tete. Writers writing about writers can rarely depict writers without falling into the trap of making them sound like pretentious windbags or monstrously awkward social pariahs. Dietz doesn’t make this couple particularly likeable or believable. It’s too hard to care what happens.
What keeps this production marginally interesting is the chemistry between Bell and Mangler. The pair plays well together, bringing realism to their flip, nonchalant condescension. Bell doesn’t fully convince as a terminally ill patient, but the play is itself an artifice, an untrustworthy perspective told by Michael as he reads Linda’s journals after her death and comes to grips with his own version of reality. Mangler’s energy is infectious even in the oddly disjointed scenes.
The problem lies, not with the cast or Joshua Morrison’s direction, but with the text. Dietz’s play is contrived storytelling. It’s ironic that his play suffers from the same conceit as his characters.
“Fiction”
Runs through July 31
Fri & Sat @ 8pm
Sundays @ 7pm
The Underground Theater
1312-1314 N. Wilton Place
Hollywood, CA 90028
PH: 818-849-4039
www.theatreunleashed.com