Word: timing
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...When the Rain Stops Falling, an extraordinary new play by Australian Andrew Bovell now having its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater - is something that really throws the audience out of its comfort zone. This challenging play has the most complicated time-shifting dramatic structure I've seen in years. Nothing really falls into place until about halfway through its dark, intense, intermissionless hour and 45 minutes. "I guess what I was interested in doing," Bovell told an interviewer before the play opened, "is giving the audience a bit of work to do." To which...
...disorientation starts in the very first minute. The play opens in the future - the year 2039, according to the program - as an elderly man stands amid an apocalyptic deluge of rain, and a fish falls out of the sky. We then move back and forth in time, in seemingly random order, with characters from different time periods - sometimes older and younger versions of the same person - often overlapping on the stage. Only gradually do the stories emerge of two apparently unrelated families, one in London and one in Australia, who have been scarred in different ways by tragedy and abandonment...
...Time travel is hardly a stylistic innovation in theater these days. One pretty good new off-Broadway play, Clybourne Park, dramatizes the racial changes in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood by twinning two scenes 50 years apart: the arrival of the neighborhood's first black family in 1959 and the invasion of the first gentrifying white couple in the now all-black neighborhood in 2009. But When the Rain Stops Falling goes far beyond such schematic parallelism. Bovell's time-hopping structure is intricate but surprisingly natural - never strained or purposely obfuscating. Rather, as in the works of Faulkner...
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...genuinely lovely person. The other seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You come home from being at a dinner party with them stumped as to why the lovely person hasn't noticed that their spouse or partner is a total stinker. You ponder, maybe for the first time, the term co-dependency. Mostly you wonder how this pair ended up together. (See the top 10 actor-director pairings...