Monday, August 30, 2010
Return to Sender: GroundUP's Letter from Algeria
needs more postage after out-of-town tryouts
- GroundUP Productions graphic by Wade Dansby 3
1 1/2 stars out of 5
GroundUP Productions
Kenan Theater, UNC
Closed Aug. 29
Beware, New York City: Ali is coming!
(At last: Now I know what Masaji Sieji must have felt like in the 1954 classic, Godzilla.)
As a character, this one-woman juggernaut is Margo Channing with a chainsaw, a drama school diva able to size up a room with a glance (well, a dorm room, anyway), and lay waste to its inhabitants with her invariably oversized gestures, her raw—or, at least, uncooked—sexuality, and a literally endless series of terribly witty putdowns. Though this baby barracuda steamrolls over all interpersonal borders, somehow the boys always come back for more. She’s insuperable, she’s insufferable, she’s…
…absolutely unbelievable. Or at least, the situation is. And that’s a major problem for playwright Michael Walker—and an even bigger dilemma for audiences awaiting his LETTER FROM ALGERIA. For after its world premiere last weekend, in a show by GroundUP Productions involving three UNC undergraduates—and actor, playwright and former Temple Theater artistic director Jerry Sipp—this work’s New York debut is slated for Oct. 29.
That’s not a lot of time to correct a first act as fundamentally unbalanced as the one we saw during Algeria’s out-of-town tryouts Sunday night.
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