AS THE FRAMES GO BY: Youthful summer passes. |
“I’m not trying to kill myself,” Mina (Tana Sirois) sarcastically reassures her younger brother Evan (Dylan Schwartz-Wallach), who thinks she smokes too many cloves. “I’m just having one of those years when I don’t give a shit.” The year in question is her 18th, and it is just about summertime, and of course she really does give a shit about a number of pressing things. Should she break up with her childhood pal and boyfriend Jake (Jeff Bernhardt) before he goes off to NYU in the fall? Is she shaping up into a townie destined to work at Barnes and Noble indefinitely? And, if not, what exactly is she going to do with her life? Into the deluge steps Alison (Ashley Love), a senior at NYU, and suddenly Mina is swimming in something else entirely. The tale of her formative summer is told in Summer Blink, a new play written and directed by Todd Hunter at the Players’ Ring.Hunter has an intuitive feel for the language and rhythms of this fraught age of life, and although his scenes progress in an almost cinematic, sometimes distracting onslaught (15 changes in the first act), he makes rich work of dialogue and characters. As they move through the perennial settings of beach, bedroom, apartment, and coffee shop, the young people’s speech is peppered with casual profanities, banter (“So dead!”), and pop-culture references (The Matrix soundtrack; Owen Wilson’s nose). Mina and her circle have an engaging stoner wit to their observations as they kill summertime with video games, bowls, and Vince Vaughn movies, and it’s a real treat to hear Mina and Evan battling it out with inspired filial insults in her bedroom.
There are also slower, more poignant moments in these kids’ summer, but Hunter doesn’t waste them by making them too frequent or grave. Humor and a rather lush sensuality temper much of what is most serious to Mina, and thereby elevate it.
The cast of Summer Blink absolutely revels in the smart, rich characters that Hunter has drawn — they smirk, sulk, and sigh with humor, luxury, and intelligence. Sirois’s Mina has candor, range, and energy, and is at once sympathetic and unapologetically full of faults. Love’s gaze has a markedly appraising quality that runs from warm to chilly, and serves her catalytic character well. Best about the cast is the vibrant ease of their rapport — they are loose and intimate with each other, with their own (and each other’s) bodies, and with the riffs and profanities of their youthful vernacular. Schwartz-Wallach’s Evan has a luxurious physical wryness about him, and it’s beguiling just to watch Mina lean, with comfort and abandon, into Alison’s arms or the expressive frame of Bernhardt’s Jake. Not to mention all the making out.
As director, Hunter hits a few remarkably resonant notes with this energetic cast. In a drunken night beach scene, the young folks zoom in and out of sight around a reeling Mina, shrieking gleefully back into the darkness, and the scene recalls that glorious teenage dizziness. Also effective are scenes in which Mina, alone in her room, sends instant messages with other characters; everyone’s texts are voiced-over. These beautifully executed scenes reveal nuances of character (in the flurries, jerks, and stalls of Mina’s fingers over the keys, the rolling and widening of her eyes) beneath the straight-forward brevity that is the poetry of IM.
