70 SCENES OF HALLOWEEN
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Then there are people like playwright Jeffrey Jones, who in 70 Scenes of Halloween gleefully replays essentially the same scene–young suburban couple Jeff and Joan hang out at home on Halloween–over and over again. Sixty-six times to be exact, the evening I saw it. Each time the details are varied–order of events, point of view, even the characters. The tone of the scenes also changes–some scenes are somber, some are poetic, and others are quite funny. All of which is enough to disturb any sense we may have of what’s happening between Jeff and Joan or what the play’s about.
In one scene they scream at each other across the length of their house. In another they speak to each other with the anesthetized contentment of TV addicts. In yet another, cartoonish ghosts gambol around the house while the two talk.
It’s hardly surprising that Allen’s so at home with short scenes given that he’s had four years and 11 months of practice, cowriting and codirecting the 30 short Neo-Futurist plays that make up each weekly edition of his long-running brainchild Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. What is surprising is how well the Neo-Futurist aesthetic–“We do not aim to ‘suspend the audience’s disbelief’ but to create a world where the stage is a continuation of daily life”–works with Jones’s play. From the moment the lights come up on Chet Grissom shouting to Susan Booth offstage, Jeff and Joan feel like real people facing a crisis in their nine-year marriage.
