Review: CONEY ISLAND LAND at the Theatre 68 Arts Complex

CONEY ISLAND LAND, OR THE GREAT EXISTENTIAL ACTUALITY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE is a two-hander world-premiere drama that traffics in nostalgia, regret, the road not taken, and the possibility of a new road leading to a new future. Set over Memorial Day weekend 2021, Timothy Braun’s script focuses on a Woman (Tate Evans) and a Man (Thomas Piper), high school sweethearts reuniting after thirty years in a hotel room in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood. He’s now an alcoholic travel writer who’s jetted in from Europe and she works for an environmental agency, having flown in for a conference from her small Texas town where she lives with her husband, a husband she intends to leave. With three decades of baggage to unpack, the weekend is filled with temptation, revelation, and fumbles toward connection.

Piper gives an assured performance, embodying an everyman sexiness with pathos and a palpable world-weariness. Evans’ Woman, however, is flighty and wishy-washy, so while she does her best to infuse her with a warmth and humanity, there’s a disconnect there. She continually calls the Man “Dummy,” which is meant as an affectionate nickname but is used so often it becomes grating and you start to wonder if she means it. There’s a sense that she snipes at him from a base of her own dissatisfaction. She thinks he’s achieved his dreams and that she’s a failure, but she seems to take it out on him to such a degree that it’s hard to understand why he’s enticed by the memory of who she was.

Despite the word “existential” in the title, there isn’t much existentialism in the show. We all go through periods of regret and wonderment about our choices so that aspect seems fairly pedestrian even if skillfully written. Covid-19 plays a small role (the Man shows up with a mask) but that detail is quickly discarded so that it doesn’t really influence their weekend, aside from the fact that they don’t leave their Best Western hotel room. They both already took flights to get there, anyway — and the point is to rekindle, or at least see if there’s still a spark to, their former romance — so they’re clearly not that concerned about getting up close and personal with a relative stranger.

The art deco set by Jeff G. Rack is tasteful and practical. Braun’s script is never stagnant, the characters always in action, whether in a delightful literal dance party or a metaphorical pas de deux, always getting close to connecting before pulling away — or being pulled away by outside forces. Director Lucy Smith Conroy makes great use of the small stage, eliciting energy from the quietest of moments. Confined to the hotel room for the duration of the show, the Woman and the Man are never bored and neither is the audience. Overall, it’s an absorbing 90 minutes of intimate theater.

CONEY ISLAND LAND, OR THE GREAT EXISTENTIAL ACTUALITY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE is performed at the Theatre 68 Arts Complex — The Emerson, 5112 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, through March 17. Tickets are available at Onstage411.com/ConeyIsland.

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