Still

STILL

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Drawn out over 140 minutes, Komarnicki’s clumsy fusion of The Twilight Zone and Sam Shepard violates the cardinal rule of playwriting: Don’t assemble characters onstage whose sole reason for being there is the playwright’s manipulation. Michael and Melissa are a young college couple en route to the University of Arizona who stop in the desert to either assist or plunder a stalled BMW. There they discover a corpse and a supposedly mysterious figure, the Man, who seems to know their secrets, who may have killed the owner of the car, and who seems obsessed with reenacting the parable of the Good Samaritan. Though Michael and Melissa try halfheartedly to leave, they can’t–the playwright won’t let them or us off that easily.

Before the body of the driver mysteriously disappears (by the end, his car does too), the couple have daubed themselves in his blood, their loss of innocence smeared on their skin. Melissa feels drawn to the Man and his 12-step blather (“Your past is the whole reason for your present”), but Michael, exposed as a thief and fraud, grabs the Man’s gun and tries to terrorize him into silence. By the end Michael and the Man have exchanged roles in a sacrifice that will be ceaselessly repeated–or, to quote the paradox on the play’s poster, “One man’s murder is another man’s birth.”