The push and pull that the title suggests, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion, describes Julia Jarcho’s 2013 Obie Award-winning play curiously well. The title is also synchronistic with the overall effect of the play, dramatically intriguing while consistently perplexing the audience and keeping them off balance. If solving a crime, or watching a play, is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, Grimly Handsome is a puzzle where the picture on the box keeps shifting. And it’s satisfying too, if the emotional distance of the rest of the play hasn’t already turned you off. While Sanders and Irving can slip into one-dimensional gruffs, particularly as the two detectives, Course’s Nelly also hints at deeper rumblings of which her affair is a symptom, not the cause.

Source: thestar November 07, 2017 18:33 UTC