By Ernest Kearney — Pascal & Julien by Australian Playwright Daniel Keene is a strange, halfling of a fairy-tale. At forty-three minutes one cannot honestly describe it as a drama or a play, so much as a musing or a meditation. However, from the first of seventeen brief scenelets that opens the production at the 24th Street Theatre you know you are in for scintillating delight.
The narrative is sparse. Julien (Darby Winn) is a precocious lonely child after a better father than he has. Pascal (Paul Turbiak) is a tightly wound writer who just wants to be left alone to do his crossword puzzle.
A reoccurring motif —well as reoccurring as any motif can manage to be in forty-three minutes— is “People can dream whatever they like.” What the playwright is dreaming about is difficult to determine. Is he the son seeking a father or a father seeking a son? Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Winn and Turbiak excel in their roles. Winn perfectly displays a child’s understated longing for connection, while Turbiak unfolds to that connection with a proper mixture of reluctance and enrapture.
As always at the 24th Street Theatre the production is as near to flawless as flawless can be. Director Debbie Devine with her crew: Matthew Hill (Video Designer,) Keith Mitchell (Set Designer,) John Nobori (Sound,) Shannon A Kennedy (Costumes,) and Dan Weingarten (lighting) has created another feast for the senses unlike any to be found in another stage venue in this city.
At the 24th Street Theatre every production is in the truest sense a work of art.
The difficulty some may find in the production is the playwright’s brevity. Devine compares it to a piece of chamber music, and you see that in her handling of every aspect of this production – an instrument to be fused in harmony.
For me, it took on the properties of a Japanese Haiku. Not an insight, but a scent.
Keene doesn’t supply any answers; perhaps that is the playwright’s intention, or perhaps it’s an acknowledgment of his, and most of ours, limitations. Perhaps the playwright intended to present a mirror for us to gaze into and look upon our own failings when it comes to finding the love in those whose only fault is they are family.
If this is the case, then the playwright and the 24th Street Theatre have succeeded in their task.
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at the 24th Street Theatre
1117 West 24th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007
Running through September to October 27, 2024
Click Below for More Information and Tickets
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