Review: Annex's PUNY HUMANS Drones on with Not Much to Say

Slice of life plays, like "Puny Humans" currently playing at Annex Theatre, are difficult at best especially when focusing on one specific sub-culture such as Comic-Con attendees. You need something new to say about your subjects, you need to make your subjects empathetic and you need an over-arching reason for us to be looking at this particular slice of life. Unfortunately writers Bret Fetzer and Keiko Green fail at all three of those elements making their 2 hour and 45 minute show (yeah, you heard me) drone on.

It's basically a soap opera with the denizens of Queen City Comic-Con. We have two old friends (David Rollison and Ben McFadden) trying to reconnect with each other, an aspiring writer (Te Yelland) trying to get her work seen, an aspiring blogger (Zenaida Smith) trying to get herself seen, a mother (Heather Persinger) and her Asperger affected, comic book loving daughter Emma (Rachel Guyer-Mafune), a couple of socially awkward cos-players (Grace Carmack and Kevin Bordi) who find each other, a star on the rise (Nic Morden) looking to get laid and a star on the decline (Patty Bonnell) looking to pay the bills, a filmmaker (Kelly Johnson) forced to interview the attendees, a comic book seller (Cole Hornaday) with a chip on his shoulder and the Con coordinator (Laryn Hochberg) trying to hold it all together.

Fetzer and Green have taken this large group of stereotypes and given them very little character development and the same old storylines that we've seen for years. And since we have beaten to death storylines then the "resolutions" of their storylines feel less like revelations and more like regurgitated platitudes from Facebook. Yes, it's rough for girls trying to be taken seriously as gamers and not get death threats. It's also tough for parents of special kids to find ways to connect with them. We know that nerds are often socially awkward just like we know that fame can be fleeting. But if you're going to put up things we already know then have something new to say about them. And if you're going to put up stereotypes of people then have something new to say about them as well. But instead they've been drawn as pathetic people for us to laugh at.

I'd like to say that the performances and staging pulled this one out but it did not. The pacing of the show from director Gavin Reub is slow and choppy with unnecessary scene changes, unintelligible off stage announcements overlapping with onstage dialog and the repeated use of starting one scene and then putting it in shadow as we focused on another one until we finally got back to the first one which just felt disjointed. The characters are so flatly written that the performances mostly all came across as one note. And with the exception of a stirring performance from Guyer-Mafune as the young Asperger girl, it all seemed pretty cliché. But on the whole no one grew or learned much which just makes for an unsatisfying evening.

I could go on as there was so much wrong with this show but we would be here all day. Suffice to say that Fetzer and Green have a ton of editing they need to do on this piece if they want to make it watchable. Cut down the characters, focus on a story and have something to say. And for Odin's sake cut down on the ultra insider nerd references. I consider myself a sci-fi/fantasy/superhero nerd to an extent but there were several uber-nerdy references that blew right past me. And so with my three letter rating system I give Annex Theatre's "Puny Humans" an irritated NAH. We all like to see our specific geekdom on stage but do honor to that geekdom or don't do it at all.

"Puny Humans" performs at Annex Theatre through May 11th. For tickets or information visit them online at www.annextheatre.org.

To post a comment, you must register and login.