By Ernest Kearney — Verenice Zuniga shares with her audiences a journey. Unfortunately it is a journey less like an odyssey of personal discovery and more like the morning rush hour commute to your office on the 405.
We have been taken down this road before by Ms. Zuniga. So often in fact, that we know precise moments to place our McDonald’s caramel lattes within the coffee holders, to avoid the gaping pot holes.
In Estrawbery Fields Forever, which ran during Hollywood Fringe Fest ’21, Ms. Zuniga has also done herself a disservice by approaching her piece more like a poetry reading than a dramatic narrative, which has produced not rhyming couplets but crippling repetition to the point where her thirty-minute performance seems more like an hour.
The night I attended, Ms. Zuniga also violated the Fringe’s Second Commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Over Runneth Your Time!” This resulted in my arriving at the next show I had scheduled twelve minutes late.
Directed by Katherine Arevalo, according to the production notes, a graduate from UC Santa Barbara’s directing program, I will assume she was out sick the day they discussed pacing.
No medal awarded.
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