A Whimsical Take On Dead Fishermen @ Annex Theatre
Playwright Brendan Healy uses a healthy dose of whimsy and charm to tackle big themes of loss and love in his new play, Emerald & the Love Song of the Dead Fishermen, which debuted at Annex Theatre last weekend (Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; tix $15/$10). And that's a good way to go about it, because a more serious take on a girl with a shut-in, hypochondriac mother in permanent mourning for her dead husband would probably be tedious as hell.
The plot, like the production itself, is an agglomeration of various elements loosely tied together by the central themes. Emerald is a green-haired girl born on the day her father died at sea, both green and femininity being signs of bad luck amongst sailors. Her mother rarely leaves the house, consumed by an obsession with self-diagnosing herself. Emerald works at a thinly veiled parody of Starbucks (which naturally lends itself to a story about seafarers by virtue of its mermaid logo). When she finds out about the legend of the Day of the Dead Fishermen, when those lost at sea walk the earth for 24 hours once every 25 years, she sets off to track down her father and find out who he was with a pair of misfit friends.
The play relies on an ensemble cast to pull off rapid-fire scene changes, which veer from sea shanty song-and-dance routines to puppetry to parodies of nature shows. It's all very clever, and aside from a few places where the jokes are too knowing or the scene seems unnecessary, Healy's script is a winning example of how to write a complicated play for limited resources. The performances are by and large good, too (though for lack of a proper cast-list in the program, we can't identify most actors by name), but the direction frequently flops. The blocking in many scenes was very bad, with terrible sightlines, and there are probably more creative ways to approach scene changes, which always impact the flow of the story. Most disappointing were several big moments between the main characters, in which the actors seemed to struggle with where their characters were going.
Unfortunately, the director responsible for this was Healy himself, which supports the rule of thumb that playwrights shouldn't direct their own work. The script is so clearly written with performability in mind that Healy definitely has a strong theatrical vision. What Emerald needed was a fresh pair of eyes to help pull it off better. Still, it's a perfectly lovely example of how much a small theatre can accomplish with they think outside the box.
