FOUR CLOWNS & A BENCH
It’s difficult to know where to place Ian Pierce in the current crop of young playwrights. Too linguistically playful to be classified with straightforward storytellers but putting function ahead of form too often to be counted with the word jugglers, Pierce seems to enjoy playing with both elements, forcing his audience to choose their own focus.
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Four Clowns & a Bench, Pierce’s latest offering, is set in a secluded corner of a public park. Here we meet Godwin, a present-day Harlequin whose quick wit has not been impaired by his drinking–“a lot”–and subsequently passing out on the park bench (though he claims to live in a house). Shelley drinks a lot, too–in bars, where she waxes alternately seductive and hostile toward the men she picks up. One night, by Godwin’s very bench, she loses her shoe while fending off one of her drinking buddies, and the search for the lost shoe brings these two misfits together in a tentative kind of love (with the assistance/interference of Nero, the spurned suitor, and Newt, Godwin’s stubbornly rational sidekick).
Sharing the Hope and Nonthings bill is Christopher Ellis’s Pill, a likewise quirky but nowhere near as coherent one-act. Three people meet in a shabby motel room: Allen, a veteran of the Korean war who’s recently robbed a drugstore because he needed aspirin for his headache; Leana, a disheveled and strangely withdrawn young woman dressed in a rumpled school uniform; and Karl, a badly frightened fellow vet who’s been looking for the other two.
