Friday, January 15, 2010

Critical Healing

Sayra Player, Peter O'Connor, Judith Hawking and
Sarah Nina Hayon in Sexual Healing.

Let me tell you, it's no fun sitting in the audience of a play like Sexual Healing and realizing you've been assigned to review a show that's choking before it even gets out of the starting gate. I don't have the same problem watching a bad movie. If it's a big Hollywood blockbuster like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I can even scoff because so much money in the pursuit of awfulness. Even if that's not the case, in the time it's taken the film to get to the big or small screen, I can convince myself that cast and crew have moved on to other, if not necessarily better, projects.

But when the performers are right in front of you, not even gracing a Broadway stage but crammed into a tiny black-box theater, the mercury in my empathy meter soars off the charts. But I found a little consolation and a lot of laughs in this piece by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune piece. Clearly, it is a critic's moral imperative to protect theatergoers from bad plays. We're doing God's work.

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