Review: Jack and Jill by Sustainable Theatre Project
by Michael Meigs
Jack and Jill is "a romance," according to playwright Jane Martin, the mysterious alter ego of Jon Jory, retired artistic director of the Theatre of Louisville. The Mother Goose reference implies a jaunty comedy approach, but Jack and Jill is anything but that.
Martin's two-character play is energetic and witty, but it's a portrait of two individuals incapable of merging two I's into a We. Jack is a big, bashful stumbling guy, all thumbs and vulnerability -- the anti-macho -- and Jill is bright, together, to-the-point, competitive and irredeemably selfish -- the antithesis of traditional femininity. Act I presents their courtship, marriage and frustrations; Act II presents their lives and successive encounters after divorce. They remain linked in the syzygy of mutual attraction, closer and then farther apart, unable to live together and yet unable to live apart.
The set provides a familiar generic urban apartment setting that we quickly understand to be anywhere at all. Changes of lighting and reconfigurations of furnishings turn it into a library, an apartment, a bedroom, an airport, a cross-country run. Our characters change clothes relentlessly to mark these evolutions.
The Sustainable Theatre Project is offering a "two-for-one" rate for couples, a judicious marketing approach. Any two individuals who have been courting or living as a pair will recognize many of these situations and dilemmas. Desire; sharing; personal space; long groggy talks at 3 a.m.; demands reasonable and unreasonable; efforts to remake oneself to fit the requisites of the other; and talk, talk, talk in the effort to conquer, convince or stake out personal terrain. Wanting something else, something more, someone else.
Jack and Jill is an amusement for 20-somethings and 30-somethings, or perhaps for the recently divorced, individuals who are reaching out or who have been sharply slapped back. Much humor is the depiction of pain, and this piece is certainly that. Yet living with Jack and with Jill over the course of these two acts, we develop an understanding for both and, to some extent, identification and sympathy.
Derek Kolluri as Jack and Molly Fonseca as Jill create whole, credible and consistent characters who are victims of themselves and one another. Director Ryan Hamilton sets a fast tempo for the piece, and these actors push quickly forward, pushing and testing one another with apparent spontanaiety and verve. I identified much more with Kolluri, seduced not only by Martin's definition of him as the inept good guy but also by familiar defaults that I share with the character, such as having the ineptitude in household chores of possessing ten thumbs. Fonseca gives us a tight, bright, armored Jill, an individual of such closed emotions that we are just as distrusting as Jack when she returns to him at the end. Is hers a capitulation, an insight and conversion, or just another deadly gambit? We do not know, and neither does Jack.
I've lived some of these stages but as a long-married man, I'm probably not part of the target demographic. The issues examined here are real, and they're both painful and comic. Hamilton, Kolluri and Fonseca dash along that line between pain and comedy with beguiling assurance.
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, March 25
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Jack and Jill
by Jane Martin
Sustainable Theatre Project
