Ross Zentner
Employees with angst (from left): April Paul, Marques D. Causey and Alexander Pawlowski are striving to connect.
If you go to the theater to experience the sweeping highs and lows of a cathartic drama, or even the raucous hilarity of a good comedy, you might be inclined to subtitle Forward Theater’s newest production, The Flick, “Much Ado About Popcorn.” There’s a lot of popcorn in it. And a lot of popcorn sweeping. The play tells the story of two ushers (one new, one experienced) and a projectionist, all of whom work at a run-down movie theater called The Flick. Most of the action involves sweeping up trash after the moviegoers are gone.
But if you go to the theater to experience something new and different, a play that challenges you to think not just about the story but about form itself, The Flick is definitely for you.
What do I mean by challenging the form? Well, if you’ve ever seen Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, you’ll know that playwrights do not always set out to meet your expectations; sometimes they want to subvert them. The Flick is a sort of Waiting for Godot, the next generation. There are laughs along the way, and a strong ensemble cast that makes the most of each line. Alexander Pawlowski’s Sam is the senior usher, stuck in a dead-end job with not much to look forward to aside from his fantasy love affair with the hard-edged, insecure projectionist Rose (April Paul). She’s more interested in hitting on the new guy, nail-biting cinephile Avery (Marques D. Causey), than figuring out why she’s so screwed up.
The cast mines each scene for moments of connection. Sometimes the characters talk about the important, revealing aspects of their lives: a disabled brother; a suicidal depression; an inability to love. But they are also just as likely to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (a movie trivia game), reenact scenes from Quentin Tarantino films, or discuss bodily fluids and smells. Playwright Annie Baker gives equal weight to all these things, and theatergoers might find themselves grasping at which one actually means something.
I maintain that The Flick is a millennial play, comprised of young characters with a lot of information and little drive toward fulfillment. As The Flick enters the modern age, it’s sold to a new buyer. The prized 35 mm projector, a creative artifact of the past, is swept away, like the popcorn. A new, soulless digital projector is put in its place. This suggests that these characters aren’t meant to be rich, textured pictures, but pixilations — each one separate, alone, and equally sized.
Yet there is something beautiful here. Something that remains. Go see it, and we can talk about it later. The Flick is precisely the kind of show that stirs up questions about what we need from our movies and plays — and from each other.
