Review: The Beekeepers
First, let me start with a few words about the venue, Venue C. It’s an L-shaped room with the stage located at the corner. I’d advise people to sit on the side by the entry as the show has a slight tendency to play to that side of the stage. Additionally, they have a few little glasses of water available as people come in. It’s a small but very welcome gesture. Thank you.
Now the play. I think the start of the play is where it lost me. I’ll be upfront, this is thee-A-ter and I’m not a fan of thee-A-ter so I guess this was an uphill battle to begin with. I have seen and enjoyed some fun and great plays where no one talks normally but you will always, always lose me when the show starts with what looks like 5 minutes of script stretched into 20 minutes by repetition, the HIGHLIGHTING of words to give them WEIGHT and unnatural exchanges. The last I could forgive but the play takes so long to get rolling that my patience for the eccentric is spent quickly.
But it does get rolling and once it does, it’s a very enjoyable experience. The two actors, Andy Trithardt and Christine Armstrong, do a top-notch job of portraying a frayed and fraying relationship between two desperate characters. Once they start interacting like real people, The Beekeeper becomes a wholly watchable play. There are some great moments of accusation and anger. And I guess this is why very little of the comedy reached me. The show is too angry, too full of buried hate/self-hate for the comedy to seem like anything other than cruelty or defensiveness. I did get a couple of chuckles but I almost immediately felt bad about doing so.
It all adds up to a show with long stretches of being very good in the second half being marred by long stretches of being not so good in the first.
This shows gets a: Has potential.
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