This post’s subject line is a rhetorical question: I seem to be the only one in town who didn’t loathe David Bar Katz’s new play. My review was assigned a B+ by aggregator StageGrade, and after that the bottom drops: The show’s average grade is a woeful D+. It’s lonely at the top.
Being the positive outlier for a play that everybody else hated is an interesting position, especially since I’m usually the only one to dislike/be tepid about something that everybody else loves (latest example: “Follies”). Thinking about the show again after reading my colleagues’ reviews, I don’t have any regrets. “The Atmosphere of Memory,” in fact, is a good example of something that’s far from perfect but works in its own peculiar way. Does it always make sense? No. Is it too long? Yes. Are many characters, including the leads, unlikable? Yes. Is it all over the place? Yes, yes and yes. But past the first 10 minutes, which are indeed pretty bad, I found the play engrossing as it metastasized into an unwieldy beast about manipulation, the definition of truth and the selfish narcissism of artists. (Coincidentally, last week I happened to read Kevin Wilson’s similarly themed recent novel “The Family Fang,” in which a couple of performance artists incorporate their children into their exploitative happenings.)
Jon, the playwright in the play, is a mediocre — judging by what we hear of his work — writer who milks his own history for his art. It’s a hot topic nowadays, of course, when many memoirs and autobiographies are parsed for mistakes and fallacies. As people working in criminal law know, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. You’d think that Jon would be on solid ground since when he was a kid, he recorded his family then transcribed the tapes, then based his play on the transcripts. But as his sister points out after listening to a tape and comparing it to the transcript, he was putting down his own version of the facts on paper, not what she experienced. I find this all fascinating, which is why the show kept me engaged for most of its two and a half hours. At this point I’ll take its unpredictable nuttiness over the cookie-cutter middle-class angst we get from our polite non-profits.