Nick Starr's The Awesome Dance is an intriguing, smartly-written New Age-ish play in several rather disjointed sections: the first is about three actresses waiting to see a powerful guru, and a distraught young man comes in. It ends in an orgy of violence. Part two is a non-sequitur with new characters and costumes, where a young man confronts a woman - something about his father dying, his sister, a traffic accident, a nurse. Part three has two lesbian women whose surrogate baby is being born in the other room, and a pot-smoking shamanic midwife. It stayed interesting, even though I didn't know what they were talking about half the time as one of the women spoke to a stuffed frog as the embodiment of the unborn baby.
There were a few good laughs and two midwife stories - one about the experience of birthing a baby, which was interesting; the second a long dull mythical story. The ending of this scene is grotesque. Scene four is a strange New Years Eve party about sisters and a shy young man. One sister channels a dog and a bad person. This scene ends with the weird implication of death by sex. The totality of The Awesome Dance is a bizarre mishmash with three very attractive, excellent, believable actresses nicely switching moods and modes in Jessa-Raye Court's expressive costumes, Julie Cavaliere, Rachel Cornish and Caitlin Talbot and one inept actor, Dileep Rao, who doesn't say one believable word in any of his portrayals. The best that can be said of him is that he says all of his lines. The upholstered set by Sylviane Jacobsen, although placed much too far downstage for sightlines, works well. The direction of the actors by Malinda Sorci is quite good, but her staging is awful in the venue with seating on three sides -- actors totally block each other for long segments, so you can't see faces for too much of the time. Since the play, despite its title has no dance in it, I suspect it gets its title from Strindberg's Dance of Death. Strangely, it was all engaging.
