A Tribute of Sorts

When kids get together to put on a show for neighbours and family, their earnestness and naïveté is often disarmingly amusing. As an audience member you daren’t laugh at something that goes wrong for fear of destroying their concentration or offending sensitivities of the players.

Our two young adult actors in A Tribute of Sorts, with their creator, explored that theatrical conceit to great effect.

Emily Curtin and Dash Kruck play cousins on the brink of adolescence who experiment with that performance style. Their characters created a small proscenium-arch theatre with tabs and projected captions to alert us what to expect. They discovered impressive words like Prologue and Epilogue although they don’t quite know what they imply.

But mostly their play is about the gruesome demise of youngsters they discovered through research. These scenes deal with alphabetical despatches of twenty-six, so it leaves opportunities to interpolate the players’ moments, awkward or gawky in the case of the male determined to exhibit his emerging passion for magic; or for the girl who is developing a crush on her cousin ─ embarrassing insights to her inner self.

Acute perception and precision from these actors, with creator/director Benjamin Schostakowski, engage the audience instantly. We laugh in spite of ourselves, whether things work or go wrong. Their professional technical team’s help didn’t go unnoticed.

Ah, memories, nostalgia … your inner child will love it.

Jay McKee