NY1 Theater Review: "Ages Of The Moon"
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Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard returns to the New York theater scene with “Ages of the Moon,” which is currently playing Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company. NY1’s Roma Torre filed the following review.It’s hard to believe Sam Shepard, that cowboy of the stage, whose works helped redefine modern American theater, is 66 years old. With his latest, he's clearly showing his age; and while there are shades of the early Shepard, the inspiration for this one has much less to do with the American West than with Irish drama.
Two guys sitting around a desolate outdoors, wild and combative one minute, nonsensical and curiously existential another, the “Ages of the Moon’s” likeness to Beckett's “Waiting for Godot” is unmistakable. No wonder it premiered in Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
Fact is though, the setting is somewhere out west, and the two Irish actors, Stephen Rea and Sean McGinley, for whom this play was written, do a masterful job of convincing us they're Americans.
Rea is the volatile Ames, a crotchety codger who's disconsolate after discovering his wife's left him over a long forgotten infidelity. He's summoned his best friend, the more centered Byron, to travel a long distance to comfort him. That pretty much sums up the storyline.
They fight, drink a lot, shoot at an overhead fan, spout philosophical truisms, both in and out of character, and generally trade stories about their unremarkable lives.
True to the Irish tradition, action takes a back seat to talk, and while the performances are sensational with both actors plumbing their characters' humor and desperation with equal zest, the overall effect is unnecessarily dull. Shepard was obviously aiming for an absurdist, poetic style, and he only half succeeded. It begins too self-consciously obtuse before settling down to more reflective ruminations.
At 90 intermission-less minutes, “Ages of the Moon” still feels too long. Director Jimmy Fay does what he can to inject more life into the production, but it moves too slowly to gain much dramatic traction.
Sam Shepard should be applauded for experimenting with Irish literary traditions. Along the way, though, he forgot how to entertain us.