Word: matteau
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Dates: during 1995-1995
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...Friends." It's "Black Coffee," a new play written and directed by Barbara Matteau, playing this weekend at the Leverett Old Library...
...Black Coffee" aims to look realistically at relationships among people stalled at the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. In this vein, it usually succeeds. Matteau does not shove any moral platitudes into her characters' mouths, and she manages to make the main characters interesting in only ten short scenes...
...five of these Gen-Xers work at Bowl and Brass, a cheesy Crate & Barrell/Pier One hybrid. Using flashblacks and present-day scenes, Matteau tells a series of interlinking stories about the protagonist Jen, her slacker-poet boyfriend Joe, Joe's exgirlfriend (and Jen's ex-best friend) Joan, Jen's boss Jack, who nurses crushes on both her and Joan, and June, the dippy new shift supervisor...
...creating the atmosphere of alienation and strain, Matteau initially relies on a kind of Beckett-like taciturnity that is only occasionally successful. The way the characters repeat and echo one another's short, cryptic statements--"I'm tapped out," "I can't"--is intended to be disturbing but the rhythm of these sections is off, often falling into a singsong that destroys the intended effect. The style is further undermined by the fact that Flee's valley-girl drawl, while effective for the character, is to mindless and unsympathetic to carry the evocative overtones that this kind of dialogue obviously...
These flaws, however, are more than compensated by the moments of real emotional engagement that the play provides. In an experiemental, student-written play, it is a great achievement simply to draw in the audeince and allow it to forget the limitations of space and resources. Matteau's play goes further; it is a positive success, and satisfying hour of theater...