A Play On Words ★★★

Brian Dykstra’s A Play on Words premiered in New York in 2009. Now, sixteen years later, the show has made its way to the Edinburgh Fringe, reuniting its original actors — Dykstra and Mark Boyett — and director Margarett Perry.

To its credit, the title is anything but misleading; the production really is a play about words. And it does ask an intriguing question: Does language actually communicate what one person is feeling to another?

Certainly a notion worthy of exploration, but for that idea to be an actual play and not an overlong sketch, the people trying to communicate have to feel real.

Alas, the two men in A Play on Words do not. When they meet it’s clear that they know each other — the barely interrogative “What’s the story?” jumpstarts the play, and though the script gives the two characters the names of Max and Rusty, the audience never hears them — and have some kind of shared history, but that’s about it. We have no idea what they want until halfway through the play, and up to that moment, they feel like devised, undeveloped characters, garrulous men shuffling heaps of verbiage to each other and the audience.

RUSTY: Do you have some kind of story?

MAX: Based on what?

RUSTY: I don’t even know what that means.

MAX: I don’t have some kind of story.

RUSTY: You don’t?

MAX: Nope.

RUSTY: Oh. Okay, forget it.

MAX: Okay.

Semantic similarities to Waiting for Godot feel intentional, but the absurdism in Beckett’s play works because the audience knows what Vladimir and Estragon want: Godot to show up. Here, the rambling carries on for far too long without any motivation to support it, and by the time some semblance of a story announces itself, the ennui is too burdensome to overcome.

Dykstra and Boyett deserve plaudits for their absorption and sharp delivery of this mouthy material, and Perry has ensured the pace never slows. But midway through the play, when Max says “Well, the first thing I’d like to do is get out of this conversation,” he is not alone.

This production was reviewed in preview ahead of the Fringe at 59e59