Starting a theater company is always an act of vanity. It relies on a founding assumption that people will gladly give over their money and time to watch company members do stuff onstage. The worst acts of vanity are the fusty, unoriginal ones—the young companies established so their members can take a crack at True West, American Buffalo, How I Learned to Drive, and the other plays they missed in school.
Eristocracy is not one of those companies. Started by a pack of 11 recent Cornish graduates, Eristocracy wants to "inspire theater artists to produce their own works by writing, performing, and directing: a new triple threat." Vanity, yes—but vanity with vision. For that, Eristocracy should be commended.
Vision, however, is not execution, and Eristocracy's inaugural production—The Little Red Motel on Baltic Ave—is uneven. Written in four "movements" by four different authors, the play fantasizes about love and death in room 11. A strung-out trucker talks with the ghost of a young woman he ran down a few sleepless night ago. A sensitive poet finds a passed-out party girl on the sidewalk and hauls her to the motel for a safe night's sleep. (She wakes up ornery and mean.) A despairing housewife hires a stranger over Craigslist to assist her suicide. A bank heist meets a love triangle meets guns, with predictable results.
The writing and performances lurch between competent, overwrought, underwrought, and—every once in a while—right on target. The bank-robber scene is a cartoonish burlesque of heist films, while the motel's moony, narrator-ish maid (Megan Dale Ross) waxes a little too moony: "Every morning, in every room, I find pieces, tiny sixteenth notes scattered everywhere, and I know something beautiful must have passed through here. Even the saddest songs are beautiful. And I am the only one, after the composers leave, who will ever know that they existed." Eristocracy is obviously proud of that quote—it's printed on the program. (The program, by the way, is fancy: trifold, black and white and red, printed on heavy paper stock. It contains no bios, no staples, and no spelling errors. It's almost the Platonic ideal of a theater program.)
The strongest scene is the final one, written by Nicholas Spinarski, about the calmly, frankly suicidal housewife (Lisa Norman) and the skittish kid she's hired to kill her (fidgety, curly haired Ben McFadden). It's an understated, unlikely encounter between two people—one with money, one without—both quietly drowning in their own frustration.
