LIMBO TALES
Limbo Tales, a collection of three monologues, typifies Jenkin’s sensibility. The characters seem forever trapped in moments of transition, waiting for some event that seems unlikely to occur. In the opening piece, “Highway,” an assistant professor of anthropology (J. Michael Brennan) drives along a highway in the middle of the night, racing toward his girlfriend’s house an hour away. He’s worked himself into a state because he thought he heard something funny in her voice when they spoke earlier on the phone. “She seemed angry about something,” he explains. “I think she said she wanted to discuss our future, or the future.” As he drives, his mind begins to reel: she may be driving right now to meet him, in which case he should turn around and meet her at his house. On the other hand, she may have started driving, then realized that he was driving to meet her, in which case she might have already turned around and gone back to her house to wait for him. The farther he drives, the less certain he becomes of anything.
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But though this measured approach makes the text quite clear, it also robs Limbo Tales of much of its mystery. In “Highway” and “Hotel,” Brennan and Bryant proceed with so much caution, providing so many unfilled pauses, that they give the evening an unnaturally slow pace. The actors seem too rooted in the text–stopping, for example, after nearly every period–instead of speaking from the experience or memory described. As a result images rarely intermingle, and the larger patterns that should give the play resonance don’t develop. The rich ambiguity of Jenkin’s text remains dormant.
