Booth actors Linsee Lewis, Brian Turner and Chad Runyon
I finally had the chance to go see the critically-acclaimed Booth at Studio Roanoke this afternoon before it closed. I’m glad I went. I truly admire Studio Roanoke’s people for bringing in unique performances like this one. I can appreciate the theatre experience when it’s more than just eye-candy, no matter how much technical effort goes into that. Dazzling spectacles only require a big enough booking budget. Thought-provoking art that can disturb one’s concept of the human psyche is not so easy to accomplish. And the actors in Booth portrayed a twisted side of humanity so convincingly that I’m sure their characters made a few persons question their own truth.
Yeah, the world is full of people like these three characters in the performance of W. David Hancock’s play, Booth. Some of them lurk through the dark shadows of everyone’s mind sometimes. The real ones tend to go little-noticed until their buttons are pushed by a society that assumes everyone can handle life, only to find out it is the life-by-numbers population that can’t handle reality… the reality of obscure, free-association thinking and reaction. Luckily, most people check their emotionally imbalanced behavior before it manifests into a psychiatric or criminal history file.
Ruth, Charlie, and Desiree have a bond that is inter-connected yet disassociated at the same time. They sit at a diner booth together as we listen in to their freaky discussions, disturbing plans, and glimpses of criminal glory over victims as ordinary and unimportant as they are to the world. Their discouraging past is forever marked by the inability to have done better for themselves. But they never really seem to have had any faith in their persons; they were meant to be losers. So here they are now, getting high on their illusions and taking great pride in their small-time homicidal insanity. They want to escape their life of sadistic escapism only to realize they are sentenced to meet at the diner for perhaps no other reason than to keep their imprisoned souls sheltered from the judgment of a hypocritical world. Perhaps their only comfort is to remain horrifically successful failures at life.
Linsee Lewis, Brian Turner, and Chad Runyon played the creepy side of what can pass as regular people we encounter in our daily lives. One never knows, and one hopes never to find out by first-hand experience. Yet some live this sub-human existence and walk among us. Their public activity may appear completely untarnished, innocent, even admirable…
Watching this play reminded me of the meeting-after-the-meeting of some random self-help group’s outer-fringe who sit for hours at a diner and seldom mingle with those more socially-mainstreamed members who leave after a few cups of coffee. That’s where I met Ruth, Charlie and Desiree before. They’re out there. Struggling. One never knows.
(Photo courtesy of Studio Roanoke)
I wonder deciding what the audience should think and feel about a work of art isn t a little Fascist. I m interested in a truly Democratic theatre. That is I think the purpose of a play is to provoke emotions and thought and reflection but that the experience ends there. A playwright can guide an audience through a transformation but he shouldn t tell folks what to think or believe. The audience can be in a very tender and vulnerable place during an evening of theatre. Playwrights shouldn t take advantage of people when they have their guard down..
His actors timing and rhythms are right on and they talk like real people talk as opposed to delivering lines in a play .