THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION
Pillar Studio
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Steve Pickering’s The Screwfly Solution, in its world-premiere production at Pillar Studio, is ultimately crippled by its length and by its numbing obsession with detail. What might have been a tremendously compelling one-act has been padded out with tiresome exegeses and a 25-minute intermission. (I once met a playwright who told me that he’d written a half-hour play, “But with a 15-minute intermission, it runs 45 minutes.”) Pickering’s play provides one of the most gripping hours of theater I’ve seen in quite some time. The trouble is that extra hour and 40 minutes.
Set in 1954, The Screwfly Solution is based on a nihilistic short story by the late James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon). Men have hatched a cockeyed plan to save the world by ridding it of humanity: the idea is to transform men from loving husbands into woman-killing machines and to force the dwindling female population into hiding or refugee camps.
A similar affliction debilitates the Theatre Police’s adaptations of a British sci-fi author, “An Evening of J.G. Ballard.” Concrete Island, one of two one-acts, is an often engaging but ultimately frustrating production beset by turtlesque pacing and needless repetition. Heavily laden with existentialist symbolism, Norman Kaeseberg’s adaptation of Ballard’s story takes place on a traffic island where a white-collar stiff named Maitland finds himself marooned after a car crash. His companions are a crazed, inarticulate man named Proctor–an urban-homeless version of Caliban–and Jane, a woman of ill repute. From the very beginning we know that Maitland will never leave the island, that somehow he’ll find a solitary freedom here, away from the constructs of contemporary society. And for a time, watching Maitland transform from an unwilling captive to virtual ruler of the island is intriguing and unsettling. His interactions with Proctor (acrobatically played by William Haugse) are especially compelling.
