On Friday night at Rachel Browne Theatre, roughly 125 people, including me, gathered in the small amount of stands to watch In the Chamber 2010.
The play was directed by Sarah Constible and was written and performed by Steven Ratzlaff and Gordon Tanner. The opening act of the play showed a man in bed with his wife/girlfriend as they battled for the covers. Right after that the woman began to relieve the man of his morning wood, which was quite out of place considering the rest of the play.
The first scene, which took place in a hotel room, was a monologue given by a man played by Gordon Tanner, sending a video-taped message to his boss. Tanner portrayed a man who's been working as an agricultural engineer for quite some time and he is upset with the current state of their equipments safety. Basically, he delivered a 45 minute speech on the events surrounding a barn fire that killed 15,000 pigs. The speech lost focus throughout some parts, but it was delivered very convincingly by Tanner. His acting was brilliant as he was able to memorize such a large amount of lines and still deliver them all with passion.
After intermission, Steven Ratzlaff took the stage which was set as a restaurant as he faced a table full of his former co-workers which were represented by white balloons. Like the previous scene, Ratzlaff delivered a 45-50 minute speech on his experience with divorce and losing his child who died of a malformed heart. As his speech went on, the boredom and offensiveness became unbearable for his guests and they left one by one. By the end of the play, he was left having a conversation with the one waiter left in the restaurant(played by Gordan Tanner). The conversation took the scene into a whole new direction which, again, made the scene really lose focus and take the audience into a different state of mind.
The acting in this play was outstanding, but the it relied way too much on dialogue and not enough on action or climatic events. Overall, it was not for me.
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