Wide-Eyed Productions' Noah's Arkansas, by Jerrod Bogard, is a kitchen-sink drama about a low-level, angry working-class family,. They're classic, low-I.Q. trailer trash, with a feuding husband and wife (the vivid Justin Ness and Kristin Skye Hoffmann) and his borderline psychotic son (Michael Komala), the grandfather (Erik Frandsen), and moronic rural police (Bennett W. Harrel and Judy Merrick).
All the acting is really good, each actor's character is fully realized, believable, convincing, a real person with an inner life, but these are not people I want to spend much time with. One interaction between father and son in Act 1 has a touching reality, and another, really engaging one between the grandfather and the son in Act 2 offers a kind of profundity. Act 2 cooks with action and conflict that grips us.
This is a high-level professional production in terms of acting, direction (by Neil Finnell), set (by Joshua David Bishop), lighting (by Ryan Metzler) and costumes (Antonia Ford-Roberts), and Bogard's take on the life and struggles of these Arkansas people is alive with rural sturm und drang with an underlying humanity. Wide-Eyed is an ambitious company, and one of the best in New York.
