Despite its provocative title, this movement-theater piece from COSmino, the European troupe at the Chopin Theatre through the weekend, is strictly ho-hum, a jumbled recycling of images about the conflicting desires of love and attraction. In a scene that brings to mind Communist-era drudgery, a man (Kuba Pierzchalski) returns home to his plain brown apartment and is doted on by his resentful wife (Rachel Karafistan). He pulls a cigar from his bellybutton and lights up, unaware of his wife’s hostility—so unaware, in fact, that he fails to notice when she plunges a large knife between his shoulder blades. Then, without apparent reason, he disappears into the TV set in a visual gimmick worthy of Pink Floyd. Once he’s gone, the woman sheds her drab outfit for a bright yellow dress, posing and shimmying like a latter-day flapper. Liberation is not all it’s cracked up to be and soon enough Cupid (Pierzchalsk in a red shag loin cloth) shows up and attempts to rectify the situation. The wordless pantomime, set to varying degrees of jaunty music, is subtext run amok. What results is a portentous whimsy that collapses under its own weight. With her highly expressive face, Karafistan is a gangly beauty and while the production itself strains the limits of one’s interest, there is something compelling about her performance, with its rapid, silent-film quality—smile, blink, blink, smile, blink, blink. Perhaps she’s blinking to stay awake. (Nina Metz)
Toxic: A Review of Poison at The Plagiarists The real poison at work here isn’t strychnine or hemlock, it’s a dreary self-seriousness that leaches the play of any hint of wit, humor and humanity.
