Heartbreak
Opening Night: May 13, 2015
Closing: May 30, 2015
Theater: Bushwick Starr
After thirty years of running a successful building company, Steven finds himself on the brink of retirement. Steven and his wife prepare for a gathering of his colleagues at his sprawling home in the Southwest. Steven’s 27-year-old daughter appears for a quick visit. Steven’s 24-year-old son calls to say hi. Someone gets promoted because they deserve it. Someone gets fired. A dog is saved. And Steven stands immobile in his house’s massive hallways, wondering how to take a first step into his new life.
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May 14, 2015
In Ariel Stess’s “Heartbreak” at the Bushwick Starr, a father offers his lovelorn daughter relationship advice. “Have a team-pardner-person,” he says. (Odd pronunciations and spellings are a stylistic hallmark of the playwright’s.) “Support-pardner-person. Listen-pardner-person. Laugh-pardner-person. Adjust-pardner-person. Person-person stuff, pardner-person stuff. Pardner stuff. Be with one yeah.” His confident conclusion: “I’ve said what I meant.” Ms. Stess, a recent graduate of the playwriting program at Brooklyn College, is a playwright and director who emphasizes language and theatricality over plot, character and narrative structure. As in the work of Mac Wellman, who heads that program, her language is lively and playful and it makes you sit up in your seat, the better to hear it. She likes puns and malapropisms, homonyms and substitutions, words with multiple meanings and words that seem to have no meaning at all.
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