Word: incognita
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Throughout On the Verge these "Victorian lady travellers" engage in an endless volley of pithy, alliterative, and highly allusive language. Plagiarizing from sources as varied as Joyce, Shakespeare, and the slang of fifties Americana, they wend their way through the kaleidoscopic landscape of "Terra Incognita," a territorial hybrid of the 19th century African Congo and the Land of the Blue Meanies from the Beatles' acid-crazed 1967 animation, "Yellow Submarine." This land is to be imagined rather than perceived: at the playwright's behest the set is relatively sparse...
...show-stealer, however, is T.J. Mitchell, who plays the eight peripheral characters in "Terra Incognita" and beyond. He attacks his roles with refreshingly neurotic enthusiasm and pulls the play's most deserved laughs. In all fairness it should be admitted that his characters occupy a comic role in the text, but he deserves credit and praise nonetheless...
Given the burdensome text of the play, its often trying twists and turns, and the demand for imagination rather than representation, the cast pulls it off rather well. Michelle Haner is well-cast as the youthful and somewhat spacey Alex, who flirts with the various characters encountered in "Terra Incognita" and has a deep penchant for the "slanguage" of 1955. Susan Gray maintains a prim conservatism throughout the play as Fanny, a young old-maid from the Midwest. Amanda Frye wields words well as Mary, a "passionate scientist" with a particularly obscure vocabulary and an inclination to corny eloquence...