The timing of the National New
Play Network Rolling World Premiere production of Colossal could not be better.
The play is about football (the new season has just begun); it’s about a
gay male player dealing with the macho world of organized sports (the journey
of openly gay football player Michael Sam has caught the nation’s attention);
football injuries (constantly in the news); and it’s about love and family (always
timely). #hocoarts
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| Photo by Stan Barouh |
Colossal, written
by Andrew Hinderaker, makes its debut at the Olney Theatre Center before the
new play appears in three other venues in the country. Director Will Davis guides the talented
all-male cast with great skill accentuating the physicality of football and
dance and how these conflicting elements can sometime be fused. The visuals are as much a part of this
unconventional play as the dialogue.
If a set could define a
production, Micha Kachman’s design clearly does. Olney’s Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab was
converted into a miniature football stadium consisting of four rows of
grandstand seating the length of and on opposite sides of the black-box stage with
an overhanging electronic scoreboard and functional clock. The latter is used to denote the play’s
structure that contains 15-minute quarters, a pre-game and a halftime and is a
metaphor for how the time in our lives is precious and finite. There is also a dance barre and mirror at one
end and lockers on the opposite end.
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