Directed by Brittany Weisner
Reviewed by Dessa Bayrock
Note: quite a bit of sexual content, and probably not a play for children (depending on the children, I suppose.)
Plays again:
Saturday, April 26 at 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, April 27 at 6:40 p.m.
Usually the brief descriptions of plays in the DFest program don’t have a chance at describing everything that occurs in a show, but this one sticks pretty close to its two-line description: “Emily and her imaginary lover, the Man in White, go to buy strawberries. Along the way they meet Craig who slowly changes everything.”
In a nutshell: Emily teaches Craig that sometimes daydreams are just as important as reality, and Craig teaches Emily that reality is just as important as daydreams. It’s the kind of cliché plot that unfortunately didn’t work for me.
That said, aside from a few bumps along the way, the actors dealt with the sorely sparse plot admirably. The Man in White (Danny Campbell) stole the show 100 per cent of the time — imagine red socks, intermittent Italian phrasing, and manly poses straight from the cover of a romance novel. While hilariously sexual, at times he was a little too over-the-top, stealing attention away from the core interactions between Emily and Craig. The Man in White is a side-line character to the budding romance between the other two, but Campbell’s constant (and hilarious) antics made a few important plot points slip by unheeded. On the other hand, with such a thin plot to work with, maybe that’s for the best.
