Marc Miller takes a look at Worse Than Tigers:
It's just a guess, but I'll hazard that Mark Chrisler has a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fixation. Certainly Chrisler's Worse Than Tigers, at the New Ohio Theatre, borrows many Albeean aspects, and folds in an absurdist element that is meant to elevate the action and doesn't. Once again, we're focused on an unhappy couple, Humphry (Braeson Herold) and Olivia (Shannon Marie Sullivan), in their living room, which in set designer Matt Carlin's rendering is very gray, and so are their lives. He's the meeker of the two, she's the more strident, and at curtain's rise they're not arguing about "some goddam Warner Brothers epic" as George and Martha did; instead, each is on his/her cellphone, two inches apart but not relating. As in the Albee, they're in denial about something, something which isn't revealed till the end, though the lady next to me had it figured out by intermission. There's an elephant in the room, no, make that a tiger outside it. . . . |
