“Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” is awesome…

Jeff Allen Pierce, Dan Mayes, and Erik Gratton in Island Stage Left's "Someone Who Will Watch Over Me."

OK, here’s where I get into trouble writing reviews. The biggest thing is that you go see the play. Then you’ll get it.

See, if you ask me, “What’s so good about it?” I’d have to say, “Everything.”

Brilliantly written play. Excellent acting, with clear connections between the people in the show & the script. But more than that.

It’s an emotional play, which flies from feeling to rage to darkness to that feeling you get when you are washed with hope, and then, just maybe, it ebbs again. But more than that.

See, all that emotion wells up on stage, but it it wells up inside us, too. The stories we tell to take us away from our prisons, for just a moment. The songs we sing to remember what is good, and to forget where we are. I’d have to tell you I teared up with one song (bet you’ll be able to tell which one) and laughed in places that weren’t funny but were funny to me (doubleback irony, a friend of mine used to say.) But…more than that, even.

The pace of the play, the way the words & script roll onto the stage….all suggest this is a well-directed (good job, Helen!) and well-acted (super job, Jeff Allen Pierce, Dan Mayes, and Erik Gratton!) performance. To take this story which has no time & no sense of day or night or sense of place & make sense of it is an amazing accomplishment. But it’s more than that.

At the end, it’s a play about us & the way we are. How we make sense of the most unfathomable, how we deal with things for which the word “ridiculous” is inadequate (as the play shows), and how we get up the next day & take it on head on anyway.

This show by Island Stage Left is a major achievement. It plays tonight (7:30pm) & Sunday (4pm), with Saturday’s show cancelled for reasons outside of the show, then carries on for two weeks after this. I believe you’ll find the show is a wonderful experience that opens your heart & your spirit…let me know what you think when you see it.

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