Review: BROOKLYN BRIDGE Is An Awesome Feat of Theatrical Engineering

Whimsical, lyrical, and magical. A cornucopia of imaginatively crafted and elegantly integrated design elements. Charmingly acted portrayals of delightfully distinct characters. Rich with touchingly expressed insights about the journey to human connection.

All these attributes add up to say that the vision of Melissa James Gibson's BROOKLYN BRIDGE has been fully realized in Ricky Araiza's staging of the play at the Paul V. Galvin Playhouse on ASU's Tempe campus.

Olga Bezpaltchikova is utterly enchanting and endearing as Sasha, a latchkey kid and a New York City 5th grader whose immediate predicament is the completion of an essay on the Brooklyn Bridge. The iconic Bridge is the object of her wonderment. Fulfilling the assignment ~ a New York City research paper ~ is the passkey to her promotion to the 6th grade and life's possibilities that lie beyond. Her head overflows with facts about her Eighth Wonder of the World, but her hand holds no pen to put them to the paper, which is due the next day. Not a pen at all in her apartment, where she lives with her mother who cleans offices in a skyscraper across town! No pen to be found! And the home rules are that Sasha cannot leave the apartment and she cannot do strangetalk (her Russian immigrant mother's term for not talking to strangers).

In a tizzy, but with a heavy dose of fear and determination, Sasha opts to transgress the rules and hit the halls in search of a pen. Along the way, she encounters a delicious assortment of nougaty characters, each of whom has a life challenge and a nugget of insight to share ~ but not a pen:

Sam (Andre Johnson), a dental student from Africa, who wants to make the world smile.

Trudi (Jessica Cochrane), a frantic White Rabbit-like businesswoman ~ with a recently diagnosed condition called Sensus Lackus Ofus Timus! ~ who frets about being late for a board meeting.

John (Evan Neill), a fellow Brooklyn Bridge buff and a worldly-wise nonagenarian who has a multisyllabic lot to say about generational differences and a bundle of questions that probe Sasha's inner purpose.

Talidia (Karla Benitez Orellana), the Latina whose laundry basket is full with wash and absorbing threads of folk wisdom.

All the players are pitch perfect in the renderings of their characters. As they move around and about the three-story edifice, so too do two guitar-playing singers (Emily Adams and Audrey Pfeifer) in the process of a tender composition that neatly weaves into the play's themes about wishes and dreams.

At its very heart, what creates community is reciprocity. A gift is not a gift until it is shared. At the end of her journey, with the gifts of her neighbors in hand, Sasha is ready for her epiphany about the deeper meaning and worth of the magnificent bridge. It is a psalm to the steel girders of the hearts that bind and define interdependence.

Ricky Araiza's direction ~ or better to say, engineering ~ of the work fits perfectly with the intentions of the Obie Award winning playwright who, in a July 2015 interview with TCG, stated: "I've always been drawn to cuspy locales, places that are essentially thresholds between public and private. They're dynamic, as they're often sites of negotiation, where people cut to the conversational chase as they're in transit...They're sort of like conduit architecture, these locations, and, in terms of human interaction, they brim with every sort of possibility...As playwrights we're often taught to focus exclusively on the dialogue, but the spaces and how the bodies move within the spaces inevitably inform the words and vice versa. I've found that the more I articulate my vision about the physical world of the play, the more designers are given license to be bold and inventive in meeting the needs of the script...."

Araiza has exercised the license fully and has masterfully blended cast, set, costumes (Lindsey Halfhill), and lighting and media design (Jamie Arakas and Ian Shelanskey) into a theatrical architecture that is as awesome as the Bridge. He has created a magical urban landscape populated by the equally magical and diverse personalities that define a city (the postal worker, roller skaters, the pizza delivery guy, and even shadowy figures).

In particular, set designer Brunella Provvidente fulfills her goal of constructing "a diorama on stage" of Sasha's world ~ an incredibly dynamic flow of partitions and elevating floors.

As short as it is, awe is not always an easy word to pronounce (as becomes clear in the play) nor is it a frequently experienced sensation. In the theater, it may surface when a chandelier chillingly crashes to the stage or laser lights fill the air or a wicked witch defies gravity. In the case of Melissa James Gibson's BROOKLYN BRIDGE, it is the architecture of the staging and the heartful performances that pull the audience to awe.

Kudos to ASU's School of Film, Dance and Theatre and Theatre for Youth for this marvelous must-see gift. Kudos to the young actors whose stagecraft and artistry are a joy to behold.

BROOKLYN BRIDGE plays at the Paul V. Galvin Playhouse on ASU's Tempe campus through November 22nd.

Photo credit to Tim Trumble courtesy of Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

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