Something special from Hyde Park Theatre

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 3, 2003

Hyde Park Theatre director Ken Wester has given Ann Marie Healy's droll and absurd new play "Something Someone Someplace Else" a whip-smart, masterfully acted debut. Clicking rapidly through 33 scenes in 85 minutes, Healy shows us a world where people don't do much more than flounder around as they try to complete their unfinished thoughts and desires, all the while expressing themselves in clichés, banal pop music lyrics and lots of other empty language -- all to great comic effect.

Jeanine (Lee Eddy at her kinetic, comedic best), is a jittery, underemployed personal assistant smitten with the New York celebrity world that is forever out of her reach. She lives in Manhattan's tiniest, drabbest studio apartment, subsisting on Chinese takeout. On Memorial Day weeknd Ronny, her staid, Eddie Bauer-clad sister from back home in Minneapolis arrives for a short visit. Or so it seems. After the weekend passes, Ronnie (played by Katherine Catmull at her most expertly absurd) can't bring herself to leave after she falls for B.G. (David Jones), a beer-drinking Texan who spends a lot of time hanging out on the roof.

Though an affair blossoms and a marriage crumbles, none of these characters manage to grab hold of the proverbial brass ring. But it's hilarious to watch them try. Eddy, Catmull and Jones all keep an uncanny sense of control over Healy's jaunty yet absurd script and give it a sharp sense of comic timing.

"Are you totally living?" -- "You're never totally living," argue the sisters before they break down in tears yet again.

"Either way, you do have to get up every morning," sniffles Ronny.

Showing us a world plagued with inertia and populated with adrift characters, "Something Somewhere Someplace Else" is a little like Beckett -- with a terribly wicked sense of humor.