A CurtainUp Review The Muscles In Our Toes

At his twenty-five-year high school reunion Les (Bill Dawes), a fight choreographer for theater and film, sits alone at the piano in the music room, playing somber songs in tribute to his friend Jim (Samuel Ray Gates), a sneaker magnate who he believes has been kidnapped by a radical Chadian terrorist group. Slowly, he’s joined by the rest of his old crew: Reg (Amir Arison), a civil servant of Persian descent; Dante (Mather Zickel), recently separated from his wife and newly converted to Judaism; and Dante’s younger brother Phil (Matthew Maher), a self-described “complex gay man” who decided to tag along to his brother’s reunion because he’s such a people person. As the group reconverges tensions old and new rise to the surface. Even twenty years hasn’t been long enough for Dante to get over the betrayal of Reg’s affair with his high school flame Carrie (Jeanine Serralles). Carrie, meanwhile, is still looking for attention from whoever will give it to her. Phil seems perpetually frustrated with his outsider status—whether as a gay man or simply as the younger kid who was never a full-fledged member of the group. Disputes about politics and religion arise every now and then, too, but ideologies merely mask the underlying issues: disappointments from high school and from the life that has come after.