The digital magazine of New York indie theater
Loading

Pipe Dreams

nytheatre.com review by Matt Freeman
August 15, 2005

Nicole Blaine’s mother was a crack addict. Terrible, and true. Nicole Blaine was also picked on in elementary school because she didn’t have cool sneakers. And through her difficult life, her love affair with Friends got her through the tough times. The latter two facts are perhaps not so terrible, but they are apparently also true.Blaine’s rambling one-woman show, Pipe Dreams, has, within its nearly two-hour running time, a compelling story. After her parents' divorce, her mother, a successful lawyer, takes a new husband, (dubbed “Scary Larry”), and together they spiral downward into self-abuse and crack addiction. We meet Blaine’s hard-smoking dreamer Dad; her distant and traumatized brother; the love of her young life, the lionized “Micky Miller”; and her gaseous grandmother. Oh, and Jennifer Aniston herself. And the girl that picked on her when she was a kid. And her high school boyfriend Andy whose vocabulary consists of the single word: “Dude.”Therein lies the problem: Blaine leaves as little out as she possibly can, and the effect is a failure to plumb the depths. She tells us almost anything she can fit into the play about her life, forcing her to glaze over what we’re curious about (“How did your Mother get addicted?”) and giving equal time to stories that we may not need to hear. For example, she spends much of the latter half of the second act explaining that she decided to become an actress, a fact made clear enough by her very presence on the stage.The first act begins with a mention of her mother smoking crack, and then moves rather far away from the topic, and ends, yet again, on that fascinating and grisly note. The 45-50 minutes in between provide us with the details of her father’s bedtime stories, her oversized backpack in elementary school, her parents’ divorce, a debate with her mom about fashion, and her experiences at college. These factoids and jokes are not without their inherent humor, but they leave us waiting for the play to narrow in on its subject. In her haste to present a full memoir, Blaine never brings the piece completely into focus.In some moments, her desire to tell us everything actually distances her from the audience. The reason she decided to put together a one-woman show, she reveals, was that it was career advice from her idol Jennifer Aniston, whom she happened to meet at a Rite-Aid. Blaine also says expressly that her choice of subject matter was intended for her own healing process. The unintended result is placing the audience rather low on her list of priorities; making us seem like either a part of her march to a sitcom career, or her personal captive therapists.I suspect the unspoken truth of Pipe Dreams is that Blaine wants very badly to express the pain that she experienced, and use it to enlighten. She’s certainly capable enough of the performance aspect: she’s bright and quick and personable and comfortable in front of the audience. What she needs is to decide what goes in a diary, what goes in her stand-up routine, and what goes into a play about watching a parent succumb to addiction, weakness, and drugs. Once those things are clearly delineated, she may well find the story (and humor) inside Pipe Dreams that is struggling to be heard.