Word: farnsworth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years I've looked around and seen stressed people, worried people, miserable people, and it doesn't have to be this way. But Harvard women, you are too smart and too strong to tack all your hopes for happiness onto others. Anything worthwhile is worth taking risks. NEIL N. FARNSWORTH...
...plot of "Rust" is a blend of familiar elements, invoking by turns Albee, Williams and others. Brad (played by Farnsworth, disguised unsubtly on the program as "Ichabod Crane"), a schlumpy former grad student, is stuck in his childhood home in New Orleans because his selfish siblings refuse to help him take care of their ailing mother. Scott (Jason Chaffin), the older brother, is a smug, cold yuppie; Jane (Sarah Yellen), the sister, is a cruel harpy masquerading as a p.c. environmentalist. Poor old Mom, played by the usually effervescent Shar von Boskirk, has nothing to do but sit center-stage...
...Brad himself, he's a quivering mess, shrill and childish, but so oppressed that he's meant to be sympathetic. It's hard to tell how much of this affect is in the character, and how much in Farnsworth's performance; suffice it to say that the first reference to Brad as being out of graduate school comes across totally incongruous, since up to that point he has seemed to be about 16. Everyone is so unpleasant that the play becomes painful; it's like watching twougly five-year-olds kicking a puppy...
...neighbor Miss Nancy (Tegan Willever), and a few familiar jokes about shouting in libraries and Geraldo Rivera. In the end, after his escape collapses just as his siblings have predicted, Brad comes close to a moral moment of truth--should he kill his mother, for all their sakes?--and Farnsworth does a good job in this scene, alternately stricken and hopeful. But the tension of the moment is dissipated in a ghostly flashback, which takes us back to the months before the lost baby died, leading us to believe that it was this event that pushed Mamma over the edge...
Despite a few good moments--usually having to do with the siblings' reactions to Mamma's seizures, which run a convincing range from sympathy to loathing to terror--most of "Rust" is slack and predictable. Farnsworth has managed to build a play that works, but only barely--hopefully he will continue to produce more sophisticated plays, and allow this first effrt to fall back into the gentle obscurity it deserves...