BY MARTIN DENTON (indietheaternow.com) | Cory Conley’s new play is marvelously audacious and ambitious and wide-ranging and, yes, a little messy. But art is messy: if Picasso or Monet had stayed within the lines would their paintings be as interesting?
That idea is very much at the heart of this enormously engaging, mostly comic, but often dead-on satiric and sometimes wistfully serious play.
‘Magic Kingdom’ will resonate for years to come
A play is an adventure, says a character named Cory. Like the author whose first name he shares, he’s a playwright. Here, he’s explaining why he writes for the stage rather than for TV. Aren’t experiences (and artworks) that are real and alive and fraught with peril and surprise at any moment more fulfilling than the plastic artifice that passes for experience at a place like, well, the Magic Kingdom?
The protagonist of this play is indeed this young man Cory. The story tracks how he struggles to pull out of a writer’s block (Cory hasn’t written a play in three years, and his life has stalled in almost every other department as well).
MAGIC KINGDOM | A FringeNYC Presentation
Written by Cory Conley
Directed by Craig Baldwin
Runtime: 2hr 15m
Aug. 16, 2:15 p.m. | Aug. 20, 8:45 p.m. | Aug. 23, 2:15 p.m.
At the Connelly Theater
220 E. Fourth St. (btw. Aves. A & B)
For tickets ($18), purchase at FringeNYC.org | By Smartphone: FringeOnTheFly.com | By credit card at the Box Office | By cash at FringeCentral (114 Norfolk St., btw. Rivington & Delancey Sts.)
When his sister Claire leaves him a frantic voice mail containing detailed instructions that feel kind of alarming (“change the locks on my apartment” is one of them), and that ends with her saying she is relocating to a theme park in Florida, Cory becomes concerned. He rushes to the eponymous location intent on “saving” his sister. She, of course, staunchly denies needing his help. He also spends some time with his nine-year-old niece, Emma, who is preternaturally curious about a lot of subjects like racial and ethnic diversity, shell corporations, contemporary geo-politics and economics.
Mainly, what happens in “Magic Kingdom” is that Cory has some adventures — and though they’re set against the backdrop of controlled “adventures” like roller coaster rides, it’s the interaction with real human beings and genuine feelings and emotions that propels the journey.
The play is a crucible practically ablaze with ideas. In addition to Emma’s odd curiosities and Cory’s own (possibly over-thought) analyses of art and theater in general and his own art in particular, there’s an utterly brilliant satiric creation in the middle of “Magic Kingdom” who threatens to steal the show every time he takes the stage. His name is Mickey, and as embodied by actor Daniel K. Isaac he becomes a living, breathing embodiment of the new animal created not so long ago by our Supreme Court: he’s a corporation acquiring the human characteristics that he’s been deemed by law to possess.
The play is directed sharply by Conley’s frequent collaborator Craig Baldwin, and features a fine cast of eight that includes, in addition to Isaac and Conley himself as Cory, Rafael Benoit, Cameron Michael Burns, Gina LeMoine, Josh Marcantel, Mary Monahan and Marisa Lark Wallin (an adult actor who is uncanny as a precocious nine-year-old girl). Onstage throughout, too, is technical coordinator Drew Ledbetter, who handles the show’s many projections seamlessly and has some other jobs to do as well.
“Magic Kingdom” feels destined for a long life after FringeNYC. It can (and will, I think) be the subject of master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations — so full of theatrical and sociopolitical-philosophical ideas is this piece, that my mind just exploded with them (and that’s after seeing it just one time and reading it zero times). Hopefully many more opportunities to do both of these things await us. For now, check it out at the Connelly Theatre at FringeNYC.
