The Sinker
by Jami Brandli
Blurb:
Josh is an attractive and charming novelist who’s just signed a deal to publish his first novel. George, his childhood friend, and Liz, his literary agent and old college “friend with benefits” are both madly in love with Josh and throw him a big party. Their cozy arrangement is turned upside down when Candi, Josh’s sexy and ambitious writing student and a mysterious gun turn up the next morning. Hostages are held, dark truths are revealed, and eventually a trigger is pulled.
Cast:
Candi - Erica Feldman
Liz - Aarya Sara Locker*
George - Rusty Gunther
Mentions/Awards/Kudos:
About the Playwright: Jami Brandli has had plays produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and Washington DC and was a contributing writer for both stage and screen for the Elliot Norton awarding winning production of PS: Page Me Later. She received a literature fellowship from SAC/Massachusetts Cultural Council and was a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Center (2007). In addition, her plays have been published in the Smith & Kraus The Best Ten-Minute Plays Anthologies, 2007and 2008. Most recently, she was a finalist for Disney ABC’s 2008 TV Writing Fellowship. She now lives in Los Angeles with her husband where she’s at work on scripts for both stage and screen and a novel. Jami does the bi-coastal thing by teaching dramatic writing at UCLA Extension and Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program.
About the Dramaturg: Erica Nagel has worked as a dramaturg, community-based artist, and arts educator at theatres and arts organizations throughout the country since 2002. She most recently served as a freelance dramaturg at theatres including HotCity Theatre, Provincetown Playhouse, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, The David Mark Cohen New Works Festival, New Century Theatre, and the Weird Sisters Theatre collective, where she developed work with playwrights includingGeorge Brant, Cory Hinkle, Eve Tulbert, and Suzan Zeder. Erica has worked in the literary offices of McCarter Theatre Center, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geva Theatre Center where she worked on productions including Anna in the Tropics, (dir. by Emily Mann), Candida, (dir. Lisa Peterson), Wintertime, (dir. David Schweitzer), My Fair Lady (dir. by Gary Griffin), and The Cherry Orchard (dir. Michael Grief), and participated in developmental workshops with writers including Beth Henley, Marc Wolf, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Michele Lowe, and James Still.
As though dramaturgy weren’t hard enough to explain at cocktail parties, Erica holds an MFA in Performance as Public Practice (which she’s happy tell you more about over breakfast tacos) at the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a recipient of a 2007-2008 University Continuing Fellowship for her thesis project, Collaboration, Context, and Common Ground: A Model for Community-Engaged Dramaturgy.
Critics' Reviews
Absorbing drama debuts at HotCity
By Judith Newmark
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/07/2010
Only three actors take the stage in "The Sinker," a shrewd little play making its world premiere at HotCity Theatre. But the story has four characters. Playwright Jami Brandli wisely keeps one of them, Josh, offstage the entire time. It would feel like looking at God.
The other characters certainly display a worshipful regard for Josh, a novelist on the verge of a big success. This trio — his childhood friend George (Rusty Gunther), his agent Liz (Aarya Sara Locker) and his student Candi (Erica Feldman) — seem to plan their lives around ways to please him.
George, for example, has given Josh a rent-free room in his house: the best room, the room that used to be his.
"It's an artist's grant," George explains weakly, one of Brandli's wry jabs at the artistic life.
Liz and Candi serve Josh in other ways, some predictable, some less so. They don't allow themselves to expect anything in return; when Candi says that Josh has ventured out into a blizzard to bring them all lattés, Liz doesn't believe her. When, she asks skeptically, did Josh ever do something nice for other people?
But as that blizzard traps them in George's house, their relationships with Josh come into focus, triangulating off each other. In the ensuing roil of secrets, betrayal and heartbreak, something is bound to happen.
Director Annamaria Pileggi keeps the mood taut, moving so fast that little glitches (like Liz's apparent capacity for speed editing, a contradiction in terms) don't get too distracting. Locker and Gunther give rich, entirely naturalistic performances.
Feldman, a very pretty girl with an unfortunate tendency to simper, is a lot harder to believe as a superconfident undergraduate, but then Candi isn't written as well as the other two roles. Candi serves the plot — she forces Liz and George to re-evaluate their feelings for Josh — and her relationship with the unseen master is plausible. But on her own, she's a cypher. That's not Feldman, that's Brandli.
Still, it's an absorbing new work, the kind of thing you're more apt to see someplace like the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., than in St. Louis. That's a fun way to go to the theater. Last spring, "The Sinker" won HotCity's fourth annual Greenhouse New Play Festival.
The 2010 festival will be held June 25-27 at the Centene Center, 3547 Olive Street. Playwrights from all over the country submitted more than 250 scripts; three finalists will be presented at the festival, which is free to the public. To learn more about the festival, visit hotcitytheatre.org.
---------------------------------------------------
Reviewed by Andrea Braun - KDHX Radio
Jami Brandli demonstrates courage as a playwright by using The Sinker as a title. If the play weren't any good, it would be tempting to make the second letter a "t." But that's not going to happen here. Brandli has written an absorbing piece, well acted by a cast of three and directedH by Annamaria Pileggi. It is this season's fully mounted presentation chosen from among the 2009 GreenHouse Series 300-plus entries. HotCity sponsors Greenouse to solicit and develop new plays and have been rewarded with Kevin Kline nominations (and two wins) during the past five years.
The Sinker is not without flaws. For example, in the beginning, we learn that the protagonist's name is "George" (played by Rusty Gunther) and that he comes from a wealthy political family in Maine. So, that allusion is fairly obvious, until it goes in another direction, though George's rich parents are a topic of frequent conversation and some disdain from Candi (Erica Feldman). She is a creative writing student and has spent the night with George's roommate, Josh, who also happens to be Candi's teacher and considerably older than she.
When we enter the apartment as the imaginary curtain rises, we find ourselves in a messy kitchen where a party has taken place the night before. Beer and liquor bottles are strewn everywhere—the whole place is a mess. The occasion for the party is the publication of Josh's first novel, American Family (another Bush nod, since Kitty Kelley's family biography is titled The Family). However, his roomie hasn't read the book and doesn't yet know that Josh has written a roman a clef about George's family. The difference between fact and fiction and the question of ownership of one's own stories are running themes.
Candi pads out in a man's shirt, a thong and a pair of bright orange socks, presumably all but the thong belonging to Josh (whom she always calls "Joshua"). It is snowing and she opens the window to see it as George enters and gets a rear view of Candi that intrigues him. He offers her something to eat, but she says she "has cigarettes for breakfast." He does intend to make coffee (even though Josh has used up his organic blend) and takes down the can from the cupboard. When he opens it, he finds a .38 revolver rather than the pedestrian coffee he expected. Paranoia ensues.
George does tell Candi some stories about his work. He's a weather reporter for a local AM radio station—not as glamorous as FM, he points out. He corrects her use of the word "blizzard," insisting that what is occurring is a nor'easter, but it's probably not yet an "S.O.E" (State of Emergency) or he'd have been called into work.
Candi gets him to talk about his childhood, so George tells her seemingly small things like that he was a good swimmer. Most important, he opens up about the seminal event of his youth: the death of his brother Billy who had autism. George still seems somewhat jealous of Billy because he is possessive of Josh and believes that when the three of them were boys together, Josh preferred Billy to him. George has some painful lessons to learn on this "morning after," the most important being everyone is a user, in one way or another, except him.
Liz (Aarya Sara Locker) enters from her apartment downstairs in a shabby robe and a pair of bright orange socks. This is a clever trope to let us know both women have been intimate with Josh who, according to Candi, has gone out for lattes and will be back "soon." Liz is Josh's agent and editor and also a college friend. She isn't feeling well, pulls out the coffee, and finds the gun too. To say much more about the plot would spoil the play's strongest element: its suspense. It gets talky in places, but it does keep us enrapt for at least the final 20 minutes. I couldn't even hear anyone in the audience, breathing, coughing or making any other human noises until it was time for a hearty round of applause.
The actors fully inhabit their characters. Gunther is back where he belongs in a contemporary, colloquial piece. He does look young to have gone to college with Locker, but that's not too distracting. His George is nervous and twitchy, seemingly uncomfortable around women, and he sweeps the floor repeatedly. In fact, I found the sweeping somewhat distracting while Liz was giving a significant speech. He acts as if he might belong somewhere on the autism spectrum himself, and Candi infantilizes him by calling him "Georgie." Gunther has cornered the market on loveable schlubs at HotCity, and while this isn't the home run he got in The Dead Guy, it's a triple.
From her bio, it appears that Erica Feldman isn't an actor, but she should be. She credibly strikes the right notes of superiority and chutzpah, even when she's in a tight situation. She would be an excellent hostage negotiator, at least for a while. Locker is fine, as always. She has a particularly resonant voice which lends everything she says an air of importance. She is also a chameleon. She's done Noel Coward with aplomb, Shakespeare with ease, and now brings Liz to neurotic life with complete believability.
Pileggi's direction is precise and she seems to work well with this group of actors. Sean Savoie and Maureen Hanratty get set and light credits. Someone needs to figure out how to make the snow Candi gets in her very dark hair to melt (or have her brush it off)—she's wearing fake flakes through the entire first act—but overall, I like the window that opens, the tap that produces water, and the look of a real room in the Kranzberg with a tile floor and a ceiling, pieces of which metaphorically fall from time to time.
There is a certain predictability to much of The Sinker, but as it comes to an end, the predictability turns into inevitability and that, of course, can create tragedy. But there is also plenty of comedy along the way, and I believe you'll enjoy this show.