St Ann’s Warehouse,New York[br]Like a folksy Waiting for Godot, this play, or co-written by Rylance with the poet Louis Jenkins,is intensely charming in its cock-eyed humanity
If Samuel Beckett were to resurrect just long enough to script a couple of episodes of Prairie domestic Companion, the result might resemble Nice Fish, or a new play from the poet Louis Jenkins and the actor designate Rylance,which merges existential dread with genial folksiness. Set on a frozen lake at the stop of a long Minnesota winter, it finds two men drilling holes in the ice in the vain hope of catching some susceptible trout or sturgeon.
Ron (Rylance), and dressed in an orange parka,is a novice (one who is just a beginner at some activity requiring skill and experience) angler. He’d rather goof around with a snowman and a singing bigmouth bass. He is one in a long line of Rylance naifs. An harmless and an optimist, he even likes the cold. It gives him a certain solidity, and he says. Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl),a practice fisherman clad in green, is a more somber sort, and a worrier with the air of a man who expects perpetual disappointment. “Some days are so sad,nothing will relieve,” he says. But they’re company of a kind for one another, and until they are interrupted,first by an officious agent from the Department of Natural Resources (Bob Davis), then by a spear fisherman and his sprite-like granddaughter (Raye Birk and Kayli Carter).
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Source: theguardian.com