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Ankhst

nytheatre.com review by Kelly McAllister
August 15, 2005

Seeing Ankhst is like watching a really bad B-movie: the plot is elaborate and hard to follow, the actors are all hamming it up, and nothing works quite the way you think the writer had imagined it would. The plot is Byzantine in the extreme—a tough but discredited archeologist by the name of Alex, recovering from a recent concussion that she got at about the time that her husband died, is working on a dig somewhere in Egypt. Her boss, another lady archeologist, warns her not to go crazy again. Then a ghost, or rather Ku (which is a sort of ancient Egyptian ghost) shows up making funny noises. Soon, it turns out that the Ku is the lost soul of Akhenaton, the ancient Pharaoh who introduced the idea of monotheism, or there being only one God, to the world. The Ku shows Alex visions of his life. We see his father complain that he’s sort of a sissy. We see high priests talk about ancient Egyptian religion. We see young Akhenaton have a dream or vision (I’m not sure which) in which people from his life and a guy in some sort of cat suit dance about. And that’s just Act One. Seriously. In Act Two, most of the action takes place in Akhenaton’s time. We see his rise and fall, brought about by conniving priests and even his own brother. And, of course, at the end of the show Alex learns a valuable lesson about life.I don’t want to single anyone out in this show, because I don’t think it would be helpful. Suffice it to say that the acting rises to the level of the writing, which is just not good. The costumes are equally so-so, as are the set and lighting. I think that if this show was done as a takeoff, like so many other FringeNYC shows, it would be hilarious. As it stands, it’s a long, strange trip with little reward at the end of the journey.