Tender Napalm Critique

                                Tender Napalm Critique

The play “Tender Napalm” was performed at the Ringwald Theater On April 12th 2015. The author is Philip Ridley, and the play features Michael Lopetrone and Meredith Deighton. Jamie Warrow directed with Movement Direction by Jill Dion. Sound design is by Travis Reiff with Lighting Direction by Brandy Joe Plambeck. The theater is the size of a living room, rectangular, with two rows of seats on either side of a performance space which is less than six feet wide and about three times as long. The design for the stage was really simple, it was just plain brown and had an old clothing washer, a dolphin pictured wood box, and a wooden cabinet. There wasn’t many audience and all of them were old couples that came together. The stage was very close to the audience so everything looked more obvious and detailed. The two actors, the man, Michael Lopetrone and the women, Meredith Deighton both dressed in street clothes. The costumes looked very comfortable and serviceable to the actors as they were taking some off during some scenes. The women actor was in a nude dress that looked cheap and the man was in just plain brown pajamas and white tank top. The women was wearing jeans after the first scene, as they began arguing, she starts to put her jeans on. As for the men, he used his tank top as a head band when he tried to tie it around his head in the scene that he was pretending to be a king of the island. They were barefoot and the hairstyles were very simple. The man had just a clean shaving and a clean cut, and as for the women’s hairstyle, she had her hair down and messy looking. As for the makeup, she looked like she had none on.        

The theme that tied the story together is that love could have some hate in the same time. This question left the audience thinking throughout the play how can you love and hate a person in the same time? The two actors presented this theme very good because they showed exploration of the relationship between the two actors and the violent world that surrounds them and the place where these things meet. Explosive, poetic and brutal, the play has a compelling tapestry to re-examine and re-define the language of love and how that love struggles to survive in the face of catastrophe. Seldom has sexual love been explored on stage with honesty, brutality tenderness. The metaphor was the dolphin that was shaped on the wooden box which metaphorically represented playfulness that connected to the way the actors had a playful acting throughout the scenes. The director expanded the acting, it required the actors to move around a lot even though it didn’t have any singing or dancing but it was playful. The elements of the production was well coordinated except for the imaginary stuff they pretended. I thought it was off because there was nothing the audience could see except the two characters which had no scenic design.