Cherrywood @ Mary-Arrchie

CHERRYWOOD was written as a series of simple lines, a play without characters, allowing the actors to assemble their roles from the lines they chose to speak, originally devised and created by the Rude Mechanicals and Kirk Lynn of Austin, TX in 2004.

"Welcome to the neighborhood. CHERRYWOOD is probably unlike any place you've lived before.
Or maybe it actually is all the neighborhoods you've ever lived in."
CHERRYWOOD at Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company


Sitting around the perimeter of this upstairs store-front turned suburban basement, one immediately feels at home in this Cherrywood world. That is probably because it’s a place most of us have landed before, or at least have the mental picture from shows about the crazy hijinks of the young & inebriated


We are attending one of those parties where you run into friends you forgot you had and end up drinking out of cups you aren’t sure are yours. It is the Texts From Last Night world that will require help filling in the blanks come tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, this production also left me with some gaping questions and a foggy recollection of what the point was. As an actor, it is a beneficial & rare opportunity to create a character from scratch (as opposed to executing the vision created by a playwright). I can appreciate the value of this exercise, but I don’t know if the production objective warrants the price of my ticket. Not an untalented cast or poorly executed vision, I just wonder about the quality of the vision as a whole.

Cherrywood was almost Rent-like in dealing with established issues like they were new in its’ awkwardly constructed skeleton of a plot. The quality of the world they created was muddled with clichés, ridiculous plot points, unnatural lines of thought, and shallow moments of meaning. The familiar authenticity of this party evaporated as the characters became actors who were acting like the stakes were inappropriately high. The play’s ending scenes were reminiscent of being sober trying to have a meaningful conversation with someone less so. Maybe there’s a little bit of merit, but it’s longwinded, redundant, and overall futile.
No revolution.
No enlightenment.

I would appreciated it if the artistic objective of Cherrywood had drawn upon the strengths of the ensemble. The production was an excellent recreation of normal and it would have been better to have maintained casual, character-driven feel throughout. Its’ strength was in the subtle, not the forced fortune cookie moments. The poetry should have fallen out through the casual and ordinary dialogue. This setting was a great opportunity to highlight the poetry that erupts in our vernacular, but that opportunity was lost on the effort put into creating drama.