Missed Connections, Royanth Productions take on the popular Craigslist clearinghouse for unfulfilled chance encounters, is subtitled “An Exploration into the Online Postings of Desperate Romantics.” If, however, it’s the romantic side of these missives sent into the vastness of cyberspace that appeals to you, I’d advise you to stick with Sophie Blackall, the artist and illustrator whose drawings based on the Craigslist Missed Connections message board recently debuted in a new artwork commissioned by the MTA, and have been available for years on her blog (http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com/).
Royanth’s show, currently playing at The Kraine Theater as part of the Frigid New York Festival, is, to my mind, billed all wrong. Unless it’s intentionally ironic, you might as well slash “Romantics” from the subtitle and leave it at “Desperate.” The online yearnings that the show’s creator, Ricky Dunlop (who also performs and directs), has culled to share with us, while fervent—or more often fervid— would not fit most people’s notion of “romance.”
Which isn’t to say they aren’t often very funny. The material here seems chosen, and is certainly played for laughs, right down to the international cast of accents (one is almost surprised there is no dialect coach credited in the program). The messages—all taken verbatim from Craigslist—are generally delivered by one actor at a time, at one of two mikes perched at the front of the sparely decorated stage. There is no set designer credited either, but clearly someone paid a little attention to this, because the matching chairs the five energetic performers sit in while not at the microphones are the shape and colors of subway seats, the underground setting of so many of these meetings (two of the chairs are black, but the visual reference is still there).
A screen in the back displays loose categories into which the material has been organized, though there is a lot of overlap. “Where the Booze Flows” seems to apply to at least a third rather than the four or so included in that section, and “Interesting Grammatical Use,” the show’s term for extreme creativity in this department, probably applies to just about all the posts, as the program itself points out.
In case there is anyone left who doesn’t know what Missed Connections is, the show opens with a re-enactment that makes nice use of audience participation. A game woman from the front row is brought onstage, and then one of the cast members sits across from her and they pretend they are on the subway together. He glances furtively at her several times, making eye contact for a total of no more than a few seconds before his stop arrives and he gets up and leaves. If she notices him at all, it’s with more confusion than combustion. He then proceeds, onstage, to pen (or rather, punch, on a laptop) a long and detailed message to her about their encounter and his ensuing intense feelings.
The point here is that in many of these cases, the person being sought wouldn’t be able to pick the writer out of a police line-up. While this is undoubtedly true, it casts the whole enterprise as an exercise in futility, undertaken by people who are pathetic, not very smart, a little crazy, or all of the above. After seeing this show, no one would want to admit to having posted a missed connection or two herself. (And it should be added that against all odds, people do occasionally manage to reconnect and pursue relationships—romantic ones—in this way.)
The first performance is of a woman, endowed with a Caribbean lilt thanks to Dunlop, who noticed a man “going to town on a Snickers bar” on the number 3 train around midnight. “I was almost feeling brave enough to say something to you..but, I didn't want to interrupt your moment with the chocolaty goodness. Come to think of it, maybe I was more missing my connection with your snickers, :o), considering we're both chocolaty. Anyway, you're cute and I'd love to hang, the three of us, ha.” Among the posts Dunlop has selected, this woman’s intentionally humorous note comes off as charming. Compared to what follows, it practically qualifies as Shakespearean in its eloquence.
Other posts included in the show veer from the explicitly smutty, which I won’t repeat here; to the baffling, as in one writer who—providing no identifying characteristics about himself—said he hadn’t wanted to bother the object of his affection, but she should let him know what Starbucks they were at if she feels the same; to messages that are deeply disturbing if you scratch just beneath the laugh-out-loud surface. One case in point is a message from a man to a female neighbor that talked about what TV shows she likes to watch, and ended with, “Tonight is ‘dance in your underwear’ night, I’m a huge fan. I love you.”
The show would also make it easy to assume that the only people who write these posts shop primarily at places like Wal-Mart, eat at Outback Steakhouse (there is a posting from the branch on Staten Island), and/or are recent immigrants (thanks to the thick accents nearly every “character” is given). By favoring the most ludicrous, often bawdy posts—as the concept of Missed Connections as comedic fodder would demand—we are not, one senses, being invited to laugh with these hapless people so much as at them. The show does not feel mean-spirited, but it can come off as condescending nonetheless.
One also wonders, since there can’t be any shortage of local material, why a good number of the postings selected are from New Orleans, with a few from Florida and California thrown in. London and Toronto randomly get their own short sections. (The cast are all University of Florida alums, so maybe geographical connection to these places is part of the explanation.)
The talented, if sometimes overbearing cast includes Dunlop, Jennifer Jean Anderson, Jake McKenna, Lauren Roth, and guest performer George Salazar, making his Broadway debut this season in “Godspell!”. Their delivery was funny and mostly well timed (a few entries were rushed and hard to understand), though again, overly-reliant on the aforementioned, well-executed accents. The show amounts to a form of stand-up comedy, and judging by the laughter, for much of the audience, in that sense it succeeds.
The show’s ending, in which the cast took turns reading a well-chosen selection of last lines from the messages, took on some of the poignancy that had been absent up to that point, providing a nice change of tone. (The show tried for this at least one other juncture, as the cast took pains to point out by remarking, “Oh, change of tone! That was sweet!” But the attempt missed the mark in my opinion.) By the end it was too little, too late. The show as a whole could have benefitted from the eye displayed here, with a better edited, more diverse selection of material (though I’m not a frequent reader, so who knows? Maybe this is as good as it gets). Craigslist shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But by striving only for laughs derived, in most cases, from people’s genuine longings for human closeness, “Missed Connections” felt like a missed opportunity.
Missed Connections
playing at the Kraine Theater
85 East 4th Street
Company: Royanth Productions
Directed by: Ricky Dunlop
Drawing from the sometimes touching, oftentimes torrid (and almost always grammatically incorrect) postings on craigslist's most notorious section, Missed Connections is a collection of the best and brightest. Creating a forum full of characters, the cast presents an evening of exploration into the online postings of desperate romantics.
March 1st at 10:30pm
March 4th at 1pm
for tickets and more info: http://frigidnewyork.info/
Olivia Jane Smith is a writer, editor, and lifelong theater lover (her parents borrowed her name from "Twelfth Night"). She has written about theater for the New York Daily News, Backstage, and the Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, Louisiana. Follow Olivia at ojanesmith.tumblr.com
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