Almost Exactly Like Us
Review from the Pioneer PressLink to original article
'Almost Exactly Like Us' is a bewitching puzzle
BY CHRISTY DESMITH
Special to the Pioneer Press
Gremlin Theatre's world premiere of "Almost Exactly Like Us" is a hallucinatory trip through three vaguely defined settings. A Muslim country, a Christian college and an apocalyptic war zone are conjured up as alternate universes, each with tossed-in Americans who struggle to communicate and endure. Strange thing is these same characters keep re-encountering each other in other landscapes. Each time they possess varying degrees of knowingness. Sometimes their heads spin with déjà vu.
Alan Berks, a local playwright, penned the script — and it's gratifying as proof that one of our own is capable of such artful literary abstraction. The writing feels urgent, in that it was written for and about the current sociopolitical climate, in which fear of extremisms is mounting.
Yet it's unclear what, exactly, Berks cares to say about the here-and-now.
Rather, he offers dream-like visions of what it's like to be foreign, lost, endangered and in love. He draws no conclusions. And that's exactly why the play is psychologically so engaging, and so great.
Matt Sciple's direction for Gremlin is straight up, which helps the audience wade through the thick narrative. (Some will find the story impenetrable. Sciple's direction, I believe, keeps it this side of intelligible.)
The casting coup is Emily Gunyou, whose naiveté varies from reality to reality, although she's consistently bookish, college-aged and hipster-like in her vintage clothes and chunky eyeglasses. She has just the right look and deflated manner of speaking to capture the jaded youthfulness of such a character. Young though she may be, Gunyou is no slouch as a performer.
Peter Hansen plays Michael, a mathematics professor with an interesting trans-universe consistency: He keeps asserting, "I am a professor," each time with the same expecting lilt. Another recurring theme is that he keeps losing his wife, Helen (played with gorgeous vulnerability by the flush-faced Shannon Rusten). In land one — the Muslim country — Helen dies in a bomb blast. In another — the Christian College — she leaves him.
Language is another hot topic — whether it's Arab versus English or poetry versus mathematics, a barrier always exists. This makes great fodder for interesting dialogue, some of which gets recycled across universes.
The narrative seems built backwards. Each line gives another clue until we're able to piece together some corner of this bewitching puzzle.
Berks' universe is at once formulaic and random, and he uses an interesting trick to drive this point home. He plays and replays single scenarios to see how they pan out, each time using the same set of characters. The outcomes are disparate, but we get a sideways look at how they're related. Michael comes home from work, for example; first Helen pushes him off, then they make out, then she stabs him.
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