“Being the youngest, I got everything hand-me-down. If there was anything to hand down.”
I’m torn here because David Schlosser, the writer/performer, is a friend of mine, and I’ve read the script in earlier drafts. I’m not sure I can be entirely objective about this three minute excerpt. The death of David’s father got him thinking about family history, and all the things he never talked about with his father. Thankfully, his father had almost a dozen siblings (farm families were mighty big in those days), and so there were all kinds of brothers and sisters to speak with and try and reconstruct the family story. Any family spanning several generations is bound to bump up against the major currents of history, and this family is no different. David is playing all the roles here so part of the challenge is to make the characters distinct. Here in the preview we meet one of them. I’m planning to see the show, but I’m still wondering what it all adds up to. David’s done his homework. The details are all there. It’s the final shaping of the details into a larger narrative with a payoff that I’m looking for. But that’s part of what Fringe is for, working through material in front of an audience and making it better. I’m rooting for this one.
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