MONSTERS III: THE EL RIDE
Wells performs “When William Looks Down” by S.L. Daniels, about a man so plagued by insecurity that to compensate he has convinced himself he’s taller than everyone around him. Daniels places William on the el en route to a job interview, a situation that makes him doubly insecure–which in turn makes him babble on about his uneventful and pathetic life to the hapless strangers trapped in the car with him.
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The overall lack of cohesion in this production is partly due to the scripts themselves. Most of the stories either stray well beyond their limits or entrench themselves in unnecessary detail. In Richard Strand’s “Godzilla, R.F.D.,” an impressionable young postal worker trapped on an endless el ride around the Loop inexplicably falls out of the train and into a truck full of sheep that then travels to Wolcott, Iowa, “home of the country’s largest truck stop.” What the end of the story has to do with the beginning is unclear. In Steve Nordmark’s “Elevated,” an angel discussing the importance of traffic safety describes the run-down state of her former car in minute detail. The images are funny, but they don’t serve the story.
