Plot tries too hard in Rep's well-staged 'Lost Boy Found'
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Laurie Klatscher and David Anthony Berry star in The Rep's "Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods" at Pittsburgh Playhouse.
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Writer Dave Eggers' truly heartbreaking book, the 2007 novel "What Is the What," is the fictional story of one of more than 20,000 Lost Boys, children who fled the violent upheaval in their homeland of Sudan. Thousands died in the attempt.
With his novelist's skills, Mr. Eggers brought home the horrors of that sad chapter in African history and its human toll without moralistic finger-wagging, guilt trips or history lessons.
Working on the same subject, playwright Tammy Ryan might have paid heed to how Mr. Eggers did it while writing her latest work, "Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods," a Pittsburgh premiere given a heartfelt and polished production at The Rep under the direction of Shelia McKenna.
Where: The Rep in the Studio Theater at Point Park University's Pittsburgh Playhouse, Oakland.
When: Through Sunday; 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.
Tickets: $24-$27; students $7-$8. 412-392-8000.
No one doubts that Ms. Ryan had the highest intentions when she dramatized the difficult plight of a Lost Boy who finds himself in Pittsburgh as a refugee.
However, she can't get past the "five Ws" -- who, what, where, when and why -- of the situation to write a play that transcends them. Instead, she delivers a two-act history lesson that reduces the human impulse to "do something" to useless gestures that are really ego trips and do more harm than good.
In the character of Christine, an East End divorcee with a teen daughter, Ms. Ryan creates a 21st-century version of the Ugly American -- a well-meaning person ignorant of the lives of anyone outside her experience.
When Christine, played with serious urgency by Laurie Klatscher, encounters Gabriel, given a sensitive interpretation by Point Park junior David Anthony Berry, she impulsively decides she can help him find success in America.
"I want to be the black Donald Trump," declares the relentlessly upbeat, perpetually smiling Gabriel.
First Published October 12, 2011 12:00 am
