Betsy thinks that the shadow on the house’s left wall looks like a set of legs hanging down from the ceiling, but when the lights dim, I’m still working on a verdict, unable to decide whether the shape represents human ambulatory devices or a vertical set of duck bills. For the next ninety minutes I contemplate whether I am excited or scared, empathetic or scornful, eager or frightened.
Adapted from a set of interviews conducted by a now-retired group of actors who asked randomly selected pedestrians to speak about a favorite object they had lost, “Gone Missing” is a hodgepodge of animated vignettes that demands complete focus, a lot of bravery from the actors and a good-sized portion of well-deserved love from the audience. The show traces about twenty stories of lost objects through a web of short scenes, full-cast musical numbers and eccentric characters that share their deepest secrets at the drop of a hat.
It opens to a sporadic introduction of several recurring vignettes (about a Gucci pump, a kitten, a scarf, etc.) that lead up to an initial musical number in which all six cast members, dressed in matching gray pants suits, sing with as much effervescence as possible they bring to their acting and engage in something only recognizable as a distant cousin of the Safety Dance.
The play, which has no discernible plot, moves quickly through characters, intense lighting contrasts in brightness and color, and heavy accents of one sort or another, seemingly written with the intention of making the audience laugh, think, and recognize the most absurd attributes of each of the characters portrayed.
The range of characters and personalities was diverse, although all of the actors appeared to be roughly the same age. Through the use of simple props, wild gestures and a continuous parody of both general human behavior and a pervasive desire to be remembered and accounted for, “Gone Missing” creates a temporary environment that makes every member of the audience feel personally represented in his or her own individual style of ridiculousness.
What the play loses in its scattered portrayal of its characters it gains in its grounded style of storytelling. The program lists the names of actors and musical numbers, but not the names of characters. This omission forces us to focus on the individual stories recounted in the production, instead of the larger life story of each character. “Gone Missing” is roughly ninety minutes of people in various states of real and imagined crisis, interspersed with both memories and caricatures of previous moments of panic. You remember leaving your lunchbox in the cafeteria and still feeling jumpy hours after it was recovered. Many of the characters behave as if, years after losing their lost object, they still feel exactly the same way.
In the final scene the six actors exit one by one, suspending their suit jackets on an otherwise dim stage. This works as another portrayal of the anonymity that the troupe had been experimenting with throughout the play; it suggests that even the actors are unrelated to the stories they told. Having laughed and sympathized with the rest of the audience, I left the performance with little to hang on to and with a hefty amount of uncertainty as to exactly what I should be feeling. I did feel, however, that this was probably where the play was taking me (and the rest of the audience) all along.
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