What could be more random than an audience member executing an honest coin-flip on a stage? Or a first date between strangers? Or a history-changing catastrophe that feels like it comes completely out of the blue?
Thus begins Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events, which the dramatist wrote in 2001, following the September 11 attacks. His play premiered before the rubble had been completely cleared from the collapsed World Trade Center, and it explores luck, chance, and free will, along with (almost as a byproduct) the potential for a new beginning—a new love story.
At the play's open, stage manager (Stephanie Gaslin) instructs an audience member to flip a coin. The course of several events in the play, she says, will be decided by the toss. Each time we reach a fork in possibility, we'll hear a sound.
Then we segue into meeting Waverly (Emily Eisele), a young advertising exec, nervously bouncing around her Minneapolis apartment. Her shy, diffident date, Andrew (Ben Tissell) arrives, holding a book and a bottle of wine. In the scene's background, ongoing newscasts play unceasingly. Distracted, Waverly is phoning her mother and not receiving a response—both are frightened for family living in Manhattan.
An apartment building neighbor named Ron (Rolland Walsh) enters and begins to monopolize conversation. A foil to the painfully self-aware Andrew, Ron expounds unselfconsciously—like a prototype for what we would eventually dub mansplaining. Finally, Nancy (Rose Proctor), who is involved with Ron, joins them all for pizza, followed by a drinking game. The game makes up much of the second act and provides a vehicle for the four to discuss free will with an ironic approximation Joyce Carol Oates.
“The moments are only connected because you choose to see them that way," says Oates. "You’re the one who’s creating the perception of inevitability because it suits your purposes for some reason, not the other way around.”
This particular staging of Recent Tragic Events is—strangely enough—one of celebration. It's a way of looking back on 20 years of Third Rail Repertory producing plays. Wright's work was the company's first, and the company reprises it now in what may feel like even more perilous times.
Writing well directly after one of the great catastrophes of current history takes considerable skill and self-assurance. Wright undeniably has that. Recent Tragic Events explores dense concerns, releasing the associated pressure with comic relief. But the underlying narrative is about inevitability. In the face of unlikely chance, coincidence, and predestination, the audience is left to ponder if the characters ever actually had a choice, or if they are in fact "trapped."
Eisele performs a complex Waverly; she discusses Victorian era novelist Anthony Trollope, vigorously pounds beers, and draws out her somewhat wishy-washy date. Tissell’s Andrew shows great powers of tenderness, despite his timidity. He's good at it; we remember him from Portland Center Stage’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Profile Theater’s Samsara.
It takes Tissell half a minute to move his hand from a caress to an embrace of his sobbing counterpart, but that's also drawn from the stage directions, which explicitly call for leisurely—actually, slow—timing, pauses in conversation, and beats that last too long. During these moments we are compelled to reflect how we would respond (or did respond) to a wildly unforeseen situation such as 9/11.
Recent Tragic Events is a rewarding experience, if occasionally exasperating. We do care about these characters, but the script's long, silent beats don't hold the magic Wright imagined. The drinking game felt very long. How Rob and Waverly fit together never becomes clear. Why is he here? Chance? Circumstance? In Wright's telling, both hope and tragedy are interwoven—however inescapable—by recent tragic events.
Third Rail Repertory Theatre presents Recent Tragic Events at Coho Theater, 2257 NW Raleigh, through Nov 23, $25-$60, tickets and showtimes at thirdrailrep.org, 2 hour and 15 minute runtime with one intermission.
