Real Danger

A general rule in playwriting is that the central idea of a play must be established within the first ten minutes, or the audience will get bored. Very few playwrights have successfully broken this rule, and those who do break it often find that compensating for a slow beginning with a brilliant ending doesn't work. Once an audience's attention has wandered, it's hard to call it back.

And yet Real Danger, a new play by Jeff Hollman, manages to overcome its painfully slow beginning to become quite breathtaking and fascinating after the thirty-minute mark.

The story sounds like something Conor McPherson would write: two college buddies reunite after nine years of silence to catch up, and spend an evening sharing their stories of the past decade. Ferdy's live-in girlfriend Vicki chimes in with stories of her travels around the world, and Edward is finally able to apologize to Ferdy for a past wrongdoing. And, like most reunions, everything seems rather calm and Big Chill-esque until Vicki and Ferdy begin to tell one last story, and the intensity quotient of the play skyrockets.

But that last story doesn't get going until at least a good half-hour into the play, and for that half-hour, the story drags through anecdotes of soccer victories, recaps of journeys that don't seem to relate to anything else in the play, and dinner reservations. It's just like a real reunion of old college buddies—perhaps a bit too real. Old in-jokes really aren't all that interesting for those not in on the joke, and the adventures of a world traveler aren't all that exciting if they're just stories and not character development. Verisimilitude is admirable in a script, but sometimes realism can be sacrificed for dramatic tension.

Fortunately, once that dramatic tension hits, it hits hard, and the final third of the play is riveting. The stories become mind games, and the rules of those games aren't exactly clear. Someone may be lying. Someone may be in danger. As the mystery begins to twist and weave, the three friends are caught up in a wonderfully tricky web—but who can tell which one is the spider? Ordinarily, when a playwright rescues his play with a truly dramatic twist, it can be dismissed as too little, too late. This play's climax is worth the wait, and best of all, it is thought-provoking in numerous ways.

As the manipulative threesome, Eric Chase, Carol Monda and Ryan Duncan are fine, and keep pace with the script: when it's weak, so are they. When the dialogue and action crackle with intensity, their delivery of that intensity strikes plenty of sparks, too. Paul Adams' direction is largely static, adding to the realism but detracting from the overall energy. But neither he nor the cast can be blamed for the play's worst weaknesses. Hollman's script shows plenty of potential, and there is quite a treasure waiting for those willing to dig through the beginning of the play. With a few revisions, he could well have the next Wait Until Dark or Dial M For Murder. After all, even Frederick Knott must have had first drafts.

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