MR. NICE GUY

posted by James Reel

    One former director of a major local arts organization used to grumble around town that I couldn’t find anything nice to say in my reviews. Well, the guy didn’t give me anything nice to say; once he was eased out and the company offered more professional, intelligent productions, there was plenty to praise, although by that time I’d gotten out of the music criticism racket and become an Evil Editor.
    Anyway, I am certainly capable of offering praise when it’s due, and I have almost nothing but nice things to say in the latest Tucson Weekly about two recently opened plays.
    First, there’s Criminal Hearts by the pseudonymous Jane Martin:

Part hip, pop-psych farce, part social critique, part theater of the absurd, part screwball revenge fantasy, part con-artist caper (one way or another, almost every character is conning at least one of the others), Criminal Hearts can't quite decide what sort of play it wants to be, but its indecision creates a more interesting, less-clichéd work than it would have been had it settled into a single genre.

While the identity of the author of Criminal Hearts, now at Beowulf Alley, is in question, I have no doubt that Dead Certain, which opened last week at Invisible Theatre, was also written pseudonymously. This mystery thriller is credited to an Englishman named Marcus Lloyd, but surely the true author is M.C. Escher, the artist whose prints toy with symmetry and perspective, manipulating our quirks of perception and causing us to believe in infinite loops of impossible objects.