Stage

Contract, on the other hand, was a model of focused one-act writing by Theresa Rebeck. Louis Parnell played a Hollywood agent, Phil, interviewing an actor, Tom, who protested after Phil backed away from representing him. Phil explained that actors are "nothing" in Hollywood, and Tom (Finn Curtin) came back with a pathetic speech about the sanctity of his craft. "Out of oblivion we make art!" he said, and Phil pitched into him again. Then Tom changed strategy. The two men tried to out-"mindfuck" each other until Tom won a contract with the agency. "Welcome to Hollywood, babe," said Phil, and the stage darkened. Not hugely original, but the pointed writing helped Parnell drop into a cruel and strident voice as Phil and allowed Curtin to be his amiably scattered stage self.

After intermission came the longer one-act about Scooter Thomas, who wisely avoided Hollywood. Scooter is dead, in fact, and his friend Dennis started the play by telling the audience about their friendship while he packed for the funeral. Every line Gregg Leadley addressed to the audience as Dennis felt unnatural compared to the flashback scenes with Scooter, but the flashbacks were the engaging meat of the play, and Leadley and Will Simkins did an entertaining job as American boys at different stages of immaturity. The growing-up rites of elementary school principals, junior high PE coaches, sex, and applying to college widened a chasm between Dennis and Scooter that seemed to run along (totally unexplored) fissures of class. Dennis became an architect; Scooter drifted into loneliness and suicide. Simkins drove most of the scenes with irrepressible overgrown-kid energy, but after you grasped the point that Scooter Thomas couldn't find his footing as an adult, and wasn't going to make it to the top of anything, the climax as it was written felt unenlightening and rote. It's a shame, because a keen tragedy about stalled adolescence these days could resonate in America like a kettledrum.

-- Michael Scott Moore