| Listless and inert. There might be a play in here somewhere, but it's buried beneath a lot of pedantic posturing. It's arguable whether plays should have a point, I suppose, but it's generally a good idea for them to have characters. CARDINAL has neither. It's so mundane, it's trying. A self absorbed, endlessly grating and false young woman wants to reinvent the economically challenged small town she grew up in. There's a depressed young mayor, father and son Chinese-American real estate developers, a kindly working class woman who owns a bakery in town and her adult autistic son. None of these characters is remotely believable and the circumstance they find themselves in is equally implausible. The play is baffling and dull in the extreme. |
