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Places Like Here

nytheatre.com review by Pamela Butler
August 15, 2005

Written and directed by Robert Attenweiler, Places Like Here was developed as part of the Playwrights’ Workshop at the Lark Play Development Center here in New York City. It is a brutal and gritty tale of a road trip from Rapid City, Iowa to Miami, Florida taken by two American misfits—Lonnie, an old drifter with a serious medical condition, played with finesse by Peter Davies, and Cab, an angry, lost, and confused teenager with a gun who is played with nervous intensity by Josh Heine.We meet them in a diner attempting to order coffee, hash, and dessert. They are on the first leg of their trip, indicated by a tiny car affixed to an impressionistic map of the USA serving as a backdrop to the action. Each time they move, the car moves as well so we follow their trail.Cab is billed as a serial killer but this isn’t quite accurate. He is a going-through-puberty killer, who is quite random about his victims. He has met Lonnie on the road, and Lonnie, like drifting debris, picks up such flotsam and jetsam and takes them along.Between meals and sleeping in fleabag hotels with bad sheets and one bed, they run into waitresses, townies, and other drifters, all deftly portrayed by Ryan Jensen, Becky Benhayon, and Lolita Foster. Cab sometimes shoots and kills them.What is going on here? An old, ailing man and a misguided youth? It is a murky father and son kind of bonding that happens in a dark current of lost, broken souls drifting at the bottom layers of our culture.Sometimes it’s effective for the playwright to direct his or her own work, but often, even with the best writers, they haven’t the skill or objectivity. The action here has a grinding sameness, and what could be great black humor in the diner scenes is lost for lack of good staging, pacing, and character dimension. To make matters worse, the scene transitions are amateur and clumsy and, last night at least, there were problems with the light cues. The original music by Brian Finke does enhance the bleakness and despair.But this is FringeNYC, a place to try things out. Tighter production values and direction may serve to aid the playwright in making Places Like Here a place we want to revisit.