Utopia – Too Much for One Play to Handle

To begin my review for this play I decided to go on to Free Theatre Radical’s website and take a look at what others had to said. There are some amazing reviews on there, about their last play. Sadly I think Utopia fell short of the acclaims for Free/Fall from 2010.

Utopia is a four-person play that explores rich and diverse topics such as environmentalism, teen pregnancy, love, health, family ties, single motherhood, science fiction, resource raping, trust, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. See where I am going with this? I felt like the playwright Len Falkenstein tried to pack in too much. The result was a jumble of pieces that didn’t seem to fit together. While the plot itself was fairly simple, and the monologues between scenes gave us a history of the main characters, I still found myself lost. To briefly summarize: the show is about a woman farmer and her daughter and what happens when a paradise-like planet connects to their backyard with a land bridge.

Little nuggets of history would get thrown in by the characters for shock value and then go nowhere. Revelations about the planet were delivered with no care or exploration. The actors seemed to be waiting for their turn to deliver their lines rather than being present and the relationships between them were one-dimensional. As the main character began to fall ill I found myself wondering if she would die soon, so I could get going.

During the play, surreal sci-fi music played almost constantly. I’m sure the intent was to create a feeling of some kind, but the result was me getting lulled to sleep. Then suddenly the soft music would be interrupted by screeching noises that would wake me up, but also irritate me.

I heard comments in the audience such as: 1) “It seemed to drag at parts;” 2) “I didn’t feel connected to the characters at all;” and 3) “What happened at the end?”

I could actually go on, but I won’t. I will finish off with a couple of positives though. The set was really interesting, and the lighting did a good job of adding to the performance. There was one monologue in there that was quite beautiful in which the main character talks about a memory of her daughter as a young child.
In conclusion, I think the concept of this play was very interesting, but for me it was a miss.