UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL

THEATER REVIEW
BY
BINA SHARIF

(50/50) old school animation
A collaboration between Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey

(50/)50 is disturbing and hauntingly painful to say the least.  The whole play consists of two monologues delivered by two women.  The first one is by a young woman standing still
in-front of a mike with house lights on talking to all of us directly telling us,  how she enjoys being cruel to people.  She confesses without any fuss that she wants to inflict pain to any one possible including her girl friend with whom she enjoys drinking in bars regularly and how she takes her valuables, money, phone out of her purse and destroys everything to bits without any remorse or guilt at all.

Some time one wonders if this is real and the actress is telling her own story or is it fiction?
But one pray's for her sanity's sake that it is fiction.  She is intense and scary.  She tells us that her
body and her soul are not together, like her soul roams around in another atmosphere outside of her
body.  Nothing is connected.  She tells us how suffering is part of her young existence.  She never smiles till the very end and that smile is more scary and vicious than all her words which came before.
It's a performance which is most effective.  Her stillness while delivering her monologue is like, Hamlet's advice to the players, her words comply to her action, the scary intensity of her stillness.
Perfect performance by Julia Mounsey

The second monologue is delivered by Mo Fry Pasic.  She is much more involved in screaming
her superficial content at everything she touches or utters.  She is loud and frustrated on the phone with her mother, extremely upset at her girl friend for not picking up the phone.  None of her talk on the phone has any depth in it.  It's all the 21st Century blah, blah, suerficiality of the hour.  She is anxiety stricken, unable to relax, twitching throughout, a parakeet, assumingly her pet seen in a video
twitching as well. Both monologues reflects the superficial, wasteful anxiety but deep self hatred
as well.