`Imagine Drowning,” Terry Johnson’s play at the Strawdog Theatre Company, is both a mystery and a structural puzzle.
As the former, it tells of a journalist who travels to Cumbria in pursuit of one story, unearths another and then abruptly disappears. His wife arrives at the bed-and-breakfast from which her husband sent her a postcard to discover what happened.
But Johnson tells his tale in a way that mixes background and foreground, past and present. After the play begins in contemporary time in the dreary living area of the inn, in a scene in which the wife nervously arrives and begins her inquiries, another scene follows that depicts the earlier arrival of her husband. The incidents then take on the quality of two stories occurring in the same place; Johnson tells each, alternating back and forth quite logically, often achieving some startling (as well as some contrived) juxtapositions.
Before long, both the wife, Jane (Elizabeth Laidlaw), and the husband-journalist, David (David Warren), occupy the stage together and interact with the same characters, almost at once. Past and present niftily merge.
Unfortunately, Johnson, author of the much-admired “Insignificance,” doesn’t deliver a drama satisfying enough to occupy his clever stratagem. The play is too clever by half. Johnson is gimmicky, transparently preachy and confusing all in one evening. The weird characters–who include a an activist in a wheelchair (Michael Dobbs), the dotty innkeeper (Jo Ann Oliver) and an ex-astronaut (Richard Shavzin) given to wandering the seashore and uttering obnoxious pseudo-profundity–are all involved in a conspiracy, so much so that the script begins to resemble a bad Stephen King novel.
The solution really gets Johnson in trouble. It involves the separate sins of a nuclear plant and a serial killer, with too few details about either.
Strawdog’s production doesn’t help. Kudos to designers Michelle Caplan and David Meihaus for concocting a clever set that doubles as living room and shore. But the actors, directed by Kristin Caskey, move from competence to excruciating overkill.
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“Imagine Drowning”
When: Through April 11
Where: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway
Phone: 773-528-9696
