As I was watching Act 1 of Curious Cats Theatre Collective’s production of Time Stands Still, my gratitude for the show was so intense it almost moved me to tears. I had more difficulty with David Margulies’s script in Act 2 but believe me when I tell you that this production is worth seeing.
The central characters: a foreign correspondent named James suffered an emotional breakdown in Iraq and left the country a few months before his partner Sarah, a photojournalist, was badly injured there by a roadside bomb. When we meet them, James has flown to Germany, where Sarah was being treated, and the two are re-entering their New York apartment — together — for the first time in a long time. Sarah’s face is scarred, and she is walking with the assistance of both a crutch and a leg brace. James hovers.
A few scenes in, their foils arrive. Richard, who’s the photo editor for a magazine that publishes a lot of Sarah’s work, brings his new, much younger girlfriend Mandy, who’s an event planner, to Sarah and James’s apartment. Mandy’s gift, a pair of shiny mylar balloons, one that says, “Welcome Home” and one that says, “Get Well Soon”, stand out like blinking neon in Sarah and James’s stylish flat, and, at first, Mandy’s guilelessness is played purely for laughs. When Mandy’s out of the room and Richard defends the age gap in their relationship, Sarah shoots back, “There’s young and there’s embryonic.”
But, because Mandy doesn’t care about the performance of sophistication, she gets to ask real questions. When the four are perusing Sarah’s laptop, looking at the photos she took in Iraq, Mandy points to an image of a mother and her badly injured child and asks Sarah, “Why didn’t you do anything?” Sarah’s defensible answers boil down to “The camera’s there to record life, not change it.” This exchange isn’t complicated enough to be challenging, but it does set up deeper questions in Act 2.
And I was already hooked by the high stakes of the situation, the brightness of the dialogue, and, under the co-direction of Maryth Gilroy and Karen Hamm, the generally impressive thoroughness of the performances. Sandra Medeiros’s Sarah is convincingly in pain — and that’s crucial because Sarah’s pain is the embodiment of the play’s stakes. Medeiros’s Sarah is also appropriately wry and guarded, narcissistic and condescending but, because Medeiros is such a good listener as an actor, she also lets us catch glimpses of Sarah’s uncertainties and sorrows. Similarly, David Nuamah brings persuasive authenticity to James. James has been working on a piece about the cinema of cruelty and, when Sarah challenges his thesis — How can he say that horror movies are simultaneously desensitizing and cathartic? Aren’t feelings necessary for catharsis? — James’s deflation is so instantly recognizable in Nuamah’s performance that it’s also hilarious. And, in the most impressive characterization of the evening, Charlotte Billing’s work as Mandy is seamless: there’s no discernible gap between actor and character. In contrast, Roger Watts is working a bit too hard to show us his idea of Richard rather than relaxing into his understanding of character and trusting us to see him.
Time Stands Still is interested in the toll that witnessing atrocities takes on relationships and, as months pass between scenes and new information comes to light between Sarah and James, there are tectonic shifts. Sarah has said that “War is just my parents’ house, but on a different scale.” At the end of Act 1, James proposes to Sarah by saying, “It’s time to call this thing what it is, a marriage. We are not your parents.”
Okay!
But, in Act 2, I struggled at first to regain a point of access to the material. Sarah has largely recovered, and things seem pretty good all round: because I could no longer identify a crisis, I didn’t know what the characters were trying to achieve — so, for too long, I lost track of why I was watching.
But a crisis arrives. I won’t reveal what that crisis is but, when it shows up, the play’s examination of journalists’ coverage of war, famine, genocide, and so on acquires greater depth. To what degree are their repeated journeys into hell about moral imperative and how much are they about compulsion and an addiction to adrenalin that can mask other issues? Given that witnessing is essential, how much do these questions even matter? And is there anything wrong or weak about recognizing the human need for joy? How much of a priority should that get?
So I settled back into Act 2.
The set I mentioned was designed by Emma Graveson. I appreciate how effectively it uses the full width and height of the Jericho Arts Centre’s playing area. Large white vertical “windows” hover above the stylishly appointed bedroom, kitchen, and dining room, and act as projection surfaces.
The incidental music, which sounds like a Middle Eastern rave, is cool and propulsive.
I even appreciated the organic set changes. Instead of having stagehands race out and rearrange things during blackouts, directors Gilroy and Hamm have asked the actors to do this work, with Sam Cheng and Anna Morten’s lighting only dimmed. This allows the actors to stay in character as they pass through the play’s time portals.
I had no idea what to expect from a non-Equity production of an unfamiliar script. Saying I was impressed by this show would be a significant understatement.
TIME STANDS STILL by Donald Margulies. Directed by Maryth Gilroy and Karen Hamm. A Curious Cats Theatre Collective production. Running at the Jericho Arts Centre until October 25. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: (Photo of David Nuamah and Sandra Medeiros by Andrew Fraser)
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