11 days left.
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found is playing at Portland Center Stage until March 22nd. This is the American premiere of the British play.
The play takes its title from a manual originally published in 1985 on how to abandon one’s identity and assume a completely new one. On Amazon.com a number of commenters claim to have used the book to shift into another life.
Charlie (Cody Nickel) is fairly successful advertising executive whose life goes to shit. Charlie’s mother dies. His formerly concealed tragic flaws and illegal activities come rushing to the surface. He decides to escape to be somewhere and someone else. I can sympathize his existential disgust, but I can’t like this wretched man. I want Charlie to succeed and be freed from the troubles that hound him, but he’s hardly innocent to his own misery.
I’m ambivalent about plays that reveal how it all ends early on. It does add an important element of futility to How to Disappear, but at the same time it disinvests me from the characters and their actions.
How to Disappear is a depressing but very solid production. I was most impressed with the set. The walls on either side close in. It’s all white, with intersecting diagonal lines forming simple geometric shapes. (These lines ingeniously also turn out to be the perimeter of doors and pull-out set pieces.) It’s the sort of misguided design I would expect of find in a distasteful public building. Indeed, the play begins in a subway station. On stage lighting is in three panels on the ceiling and the floor. There is only one appropriate adjective for it, “institutional.”
While this fatalistic show is excellent “entertainment,” don’t expect to leave in a good mood.
(As a side note, although the acting was quite satisfactory, I really wish they hadn’t tried to do British accents.)
Portland Center Stage
128 NW Eleventh Avenue
Until March 22
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