History: Reviews

Like the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, what's best about the Scaffold Project—the Curious Theatre Branch's new initiative in developing the work of emerging artists—is that it encourages fresh approaches, bends boundaries, and upends expectations. And like the troupe's own work, the program's two debut productions are more concerned with uncovering subtext than presenting a slick veneer.

There's quite a bit of Beckett in Shawn Reddy's Influenza and the Misapplication of Cold Cream, an existential one-act in which a man recounts his first experience with snowfall and fragmented impressions of his mother's death. Reddy's words are potent and jagged, although the dialogue is often too elliptical to gain much momentum. But the tenuous interplay between the man and his female companion is vintage Curious theater—open-ended and fraught with obstacles—and Beau O'Reilly and Marianne Fieber fill the gaps in the script with their intimate performances.