Past Reviews Regional Reviews: St. Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville is hosting a return to the cyber-village from Hell, but tickets are already scarce. Maybe you can score one or two by checking on some kind of local clearinghouse for social media The show is part Miss Lonelyhearts, part Lord of the Flies , and part Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson , and as funny and horrifying and sharp and overwhelming as it is touching and just plain weird.
I loved it. Actor Will Bonfiglio started the project, looking on Craigslist. And somehow, they've come up with a meta-narrative, and action that undeniably rises to all the monstrous heights of human desire.
Cashion also directs the revival, and it can be as remarkably precise and classical in its presentation as it is insane and despairing of the modern world. But when they're not forged into a single, cohesive force, they're a furious collective of cheating husbands and yearning ex-mistresses, and everything else people are confessing about these days, in bolder and bolder terms. In a way I'm grateful for the staging: having a whole chorus recite the dirtiest sexualized want-ads somehow takes nearly all of the anguish and offense out of it.
But as with any uncontrolled form of self-expression, there are also the Craigslist enforcers like Natasha Toro , giving politely insistent advice on grammar, taking extremely personal photographs, and more. In the final ten minutes or so, Ellie Schwetye stands on a chair and shouts like a Christian Cassandra, against all the corruption, while the others march around chanting ritualized behaviors from a Catholic church service.
It's an impossibly primal but unmistakably American mini-epic. And, stepping back for just a moment, who knew people had so much time for sex? Ryan Wiechmann has a great comic reading of a clever ad for an old s-'80s style coffee table that has been the platform for a lot of drug abuse "I'm 40 and I can't keep up with my 'disco table' anymore! Toro has moments of pathos, including one where she's truly "just seeking a gal pal.
