By Bart Greenberg****The intriguing new play, Picked Up, part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, tells the story of a late afternoon accidental encounter between two very different men in a Lower East Side gay bar (with a basement hook up area). On the surface, the men couldn’t be more different. “Man 1” is an unemployed underachieving Irish-American who lives on Long Island with his mother, who is descending into dementia. “Man 2” is a successful Italian-American New York City Education Department employee, married to a man and living in Harlem. The only thing they have in common is boyhoods spent in Brooklyn. But there is an instant attraction between these two individuals, not just sexual, but something more. Layers of the story of their lives are peeled apart slowly, creating suspense and raising more questions than the play answers, as a disorienting ambiguity takes over. Have they met before? Are either of them lying? What are they running from?
Dan Manjovi has created these questions and more in his new play. Best known as a successful jazz composer/musician, he exposes strong talents as a writer. His two characters are finely defined; the tension in the piece grows slowly. The chief relationships for these two men are with those we never see (the mother, the husband). The unfolding action is impactful and emotionally filled (whatever did playwrights do before cell phones?). It’s true that the play pivots on an unlikely coincidence, but it is notable that the audience accepts it as the conflict develops. Picked Up evokes other two-character dramas, especially Edward Albee’s Zoo Story and the early works of Harold Pinter, but there is a freshness to this writing that keeps the play from seeming a pale copy.
Director Christopher Scott reveals a deft and almost invisible hand in shaping the material. An evocative set by Josh Iacovelli, making the most of an obviously limited budget, creates a world for the characters to dwell in. Much praise is due the two fine actors, Gallen Murphy-Hoffman (“Man 2”) and Joseph J. Parks (“Man 1”) who never miss a beat despite some technical misfires that could easily have taken them out of character. Both actors delineate their roles with unfussy performances that seem so natural that the acting vanishes.
Picked Up will have three more performances on August 17, 18 and 20 at the Theatre Row theater complex, 410 West 42nd St., NYC. Tickets may be purchased online at BroadwayBoundFestival.com or at the theater box office.
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