THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY - The Tragedies of the Bourgeoisie

Scott Burkell and Paul Loesel's new musical THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY presented by Dream Light Theatre Company is an exploration of love, friendship, and those pesky, unwanted household appliances.

More conceptual than plot-driven, the story follows a group of friends - comfortable, white Manhattanites who met in college in Michigan. Karen (Courtney Balan) throws a great dinner party, but can she relinquish control for long enough to fall in love? Bev (Kelly McCormick) is a successful businesswoman who suspects her husband is cheating on her. Meanwhile, Zach (Patrick Oliver Jones), her husband - - festers. He is unhappy, he realizes, when it dawns on him that he and Bev own a cappuccino machine that they never use. Sam (Kristoffer Cusick) has a penchant for developing relationships that he knows he shouldn't - at least, so says his best friend Karen - and shows up to a dinner party with obvious qualms about his new beau Joey. Joey (Jonathan Parkey) is a just a college kid Sam's friends say, but as it turns out, far more interesting than any of his fellow characters; Joey is quite clear about his goals in this musical, and as we get to know him, we begin to understand why. Unfortunately, he really gets short-changed when is storyline is somewhat awkwardly dismissed. And then there is the quirky - and talented - Pamela Bob as Kate. Kate is the token oddball and another victim squelched by the meandering stories of her peers. Bob is funny in a role that would otherwise be irritating, but save for a small scene where she starts to get serious, she serves only as comic relief. As a whole this group is a strange one. They lack enough distinguishing characteristics to bring them to life. That and petty complaints about their more than comfortable collective New York existence, make for a pretty unlikeable crew.

In an effort to dramatize the ordinary - those moments that transcend the mundane in their simplicity - Burkell and Loesel have instead come up with something more akin to reality television, by holding up not only ordinary, but arbitrary events such as Karen and Kate staying home and playing Yahtzee on a Friday night; which lacks the context or meaning to come close to "extraordinary." Oddly, the play treats more significant points with a perverse irreverence. The culmination of what might have been a touching scene between two characters goes horribly awry, devolving into an embarrassing musical number as straight characters speculate about what it might be like to be in a gay relationship.

THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY is imbalanced - making small of the large and large of the small, with songs planted throughout that do little to illuminate the characters or their individual qualities. Numbers like, "Join Us" and "The History of Us" (the two opening numbers) don't so much move the story as stall it. A more effective song is the nonsensical "Kate's Thanksgiving Dream." The moment of fantasy was surprising, complex, funny, and strange - in a few words everything we would hope to find in the extraordinary ordinary, but don't quite get.

 

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