Today Is My Birthday
Opening Night: November 28, 2017
Closing: December 23, 2017
Theater: New Ohio Theatre
Emily, a would-be writer, retreats home to O’ahu after Manhattan finally gets the best of her. Trading one island for another doesn’t help, though, and when she stumbles into a gig as an actor on a shock-jock radio dating show, she finds herself strangely determined to turn fantasy into reality. Told through a playful mixture of phone calls, voicemails, and live radio spots, Today Is My Birthday is a comedy about loneliness in the age of connection.
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December 10, 2017
Like sadomasochists, playwrights sometimes seek freedom through peculiar restraints. Beckett’s experiments in deprivation — his monodrama “Not I” stars a pair of lips — explore how much can be removed from the theatrical experience and still leave theater. Other recent one-arm-tied challenges have included epistolary plays, plays performed in darkness and plays spoken in invented languages. Bess Wohl’s marvelous “Small Mouth Sounds” is set at a silent retreat. The charming dramedy “Today Is My Birthday,” which opened on Thursday evening in a Page 73 production, gives this tradition a contemporary twist. As Susan Soon He Stanton explains at the start of her script, the play “entirely takes place on the telephone, live radio, voice message, and intercom.” (Butt dials and accidental FaceTime calls also figure in.) As a result, no characters are ever in the same location as the protagonist, Emily, a 29-year-old Columbia J-school graduate who has returned to her native Hawaii having “failed in every single way” at life in New York.
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