Review - First Love at the Under The Radar Festival

You don't need an economic crisis to appreciate some good theatre at less than the price of a top shelf martini but at $15 a pop the Fifth Annual Under The Radar Festival (running through Sunday at various venues, but mostly at The Public Theater) can keep you stimulated all day with an international grab bag of adventurous productions for less than the price of freezing your butt off on line to buy a TKTS twofer.

This past Saturday I caught the festival's darkly funny and entertaining offering from Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland], a company that specializes in recitals of prose texts by Samuel Beckett. Their production of First Love is the complete text of Beckett's same-named 1946 short story, performed as a monologue by Conor Lovett under the direction of his wife, Judy Hegarty Lovett. For those who enjoy utilizing their attention span after the house lights dim, this is a good one.

"The mistake one makes is to speak to people," says the unnamed narrator who feels more comfortable spending his days picnicking at cemeteries ("My banana tastes sweeter when sitting on a tomb.") and observing the grief of widows at funerals. Shortly after the death of his father, an event that strikes him indifferently, he finds himself locked out of his family home and takes refuge on a public bench. Though at first he's annoyed when his privacy is disturbed by a woman sitting next to him, natural urges take over ("...man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection...") and his association with her pits self-involved instincts against the social expectations when acting upon them.

Playing an uncomplicated, emotionally aloof character, director Lovett has actor Lovett standing near motionless at center stage with his hands to his side for much of the 80 minute piece. She teases the audience at one point by having him take down one of the two benches that have been standing on edge nearby and then has him reconsider and just put it back up again and continue in his assigned spot.

His taught, angular face sticking out of the blue hoodie he wears under a dark suit, Lovitt's slow, ill-at-ease speech draws the audience in with a rather fatalistic simplicity, giving him an amusing pathos. It's a fine, intimate expression of Beckett's exploration of a man's obsession with his own mortality and quite captivating theatre.