The Lights illuminates via sudden flashes or prolonged exposure the gritty lives of big city (New York?) denizens in their struggles with ordinary jobs, failed relationships, and corrupting influences. In 15 galvanizing scenes the extraordinary Necessary Theater cast makes the characters they portray disturbingly real. Howard Korder's play is a kind of theatrical collage in which scenes involving five major characters and some others are cut up and pasted together. Lilian (Mary Oliver Humke) and Rose (Susan Linville) work in dead-end department store jobs. Lilian's abusive boyfriend Fredric (Alec Volz), a busboy in a restaurant, is on a steady downhill treadmill. Diamond (Tad Chitwood) and Erenhart (Brent Gettelfinger), completing a business deal in a bar, take up with Lilian and Rose, who have stopped by for drinks.
Linville and Chitwood are great fun to watch as they have a high old time together, while Gettelfinger and the marvelously-talented Humke circle each other warily before ending the evening in a shockingly unexpected way. The absurdities and difficulties of trying to survive or progress in a dirty, over-crowded city teeming with crazy street people, countless irritants, and too much noise, while having too few or no friends is brilliantly conveyed in Linville's extended riff on the subject.
As for others in the cast, special praise must go to Mark Forman for his scene-stealing turn as a doggedly persuasive homeless man who desperately needs to change his trousers, Christopher Neill Bailey as a highly excitable observation deck guard, and Elisabeth Taylor as both a movie-star groupie and an inattentive waitress. A stolen department store watch starts the action, which moves through scenes in an apartment building, an elevated train, a street, an alley behind a restaurant, a restaurant, a hotel lobby, the observation deck of a skyscraper, the back room of a pinball arcade and the interior of an abandoned building before ending full-circle back at the department store.
Director Bert Harris has elicited strong performances and managed fluid scene changes in a play that, in lesser hands, could have been somewhat routine.
