Anna’s sexual awakening is the only part of the script where I feel the writing could have been better, but Heller’s done more than enough to prove herself with The Boy in the Basement. The play is at least partly autobiographical—in the playwright’s note, Heller contends that “her housemates wanted [her] to tell you that none of the stuff in this play actually happened even though it did." It is unclear whether Heller can go beyond an homage to the romance novel, and this may end up being the lone or rare play in a young romance novelist’s career. But with her sharp eye for social and sexual dynamics, there’s a lot of room for growth.
Kansas City Or Along The Way has one quality that almost no other Fringe Festival shows has: it’s a revival, or at least a pseudo-revival. Rising playwright Robert Attenweiler’s Depression-era tale centering around a chance meeting on a southern Ohio train car was first produced as a workshop two years ago, before Attenweiler had much else on his résumé. Structurally, the play recalls Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul in its use of combining multiple characters' monologues to form an unreliable narration and mask the true plot details until the play’s end.
But what Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul’s structure had that Kansas City does not are distinct starting and ending points between each monologue. In those plays, as in most great monologue plays, we could spend enough time with a character to fully build relationships with all the characters in the picture. While the constant rotation between the monologues of Joseph (Adam Groves) and Louise (Rebecca Benhayon) certainly makes the situation more confusing, it also prevents the play from building any sort of momentum or sense of attachment. The narrative and chronological relationship between the two monologues is unclear until the climactic meeting scene at the end, which serves as the play’s only moment of dialogue. It’s not surprising that this is the most compelling portion of Kansas City Or Along The Way, as we can finally see Joseph and Louise as human beings, as opposed to intermittent performers.
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