Whorl Inside a Loop
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Cititour.com Review
Writers of many sorts have been fascinated with the idea of duality of personality (“Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde anyone), but actress Sherie Rene Scott and her “Everyday Rapture” collaborator Dick Scanlan have shed their own particular light on the dark side of human nature in the excellent play “Whorl Inside a Loop,” now premiering at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theatre.
If you’ve ever been fingerprinted (and I haven’t), or maybe just watched “CSI,” the show’s title may mean something to you. For the rest of us, it refers to a special fingerprint pattern that belongs to someone both super-kind and super-evil. And as we learn through these engrossing 100 minutes, it’s a pattern that could well belong to one of six inmates, all murders, being taught weekly by “The Volunteer” (Scott, equally effective in ditzy comic and strikingly dramatic modes). She is convinced she also has this rare mark, no matter how often she’s told it isn’t true, but she proves to be even more of a dual personality than anyone else on stage.
While we think she’s simply doing a good deed by giving a class on “theatricalizing the personal narrative,”, we come to learn that her reason for being a prison teacher is as a form of community service for a crime that is almost as bad as the ones committed by the men in her class. And as the play progresses, she’s commits grand larceny of a sort – stealing the men’s stories for a new Broadway play based on her experience. (OK, the meta-aspect of the show can admittedly get a bit dizzying at times. And it’s hard not to wonder what, if anything, Scott is actually confessing about her real life.)
The true highlights of the play are the unbelievably affecting monologues we hear, in which the men describe terrible childhoods, and which were directly taken from the real prisoners that Scott and Scanlan did teach at a New York-area jail. They are a harsh reminder of how different any of our lives could have been under other circumstances, while Scott’s manipulative, vaguely amoral character is perhaps a cautionary tale to remind us of what our lives can be if we don’t take proper care of ourselves and those we love.
To her vast credit, Scott is merely a member of the ensemble in Michael Mayer’s beautifully chosen cast (she doesn’t even take a star bow), and there are few words of praise strong enough for her fellow actors, Derrick Baskin, Nicholas Christopher, Chris Myers, Ryan Quinn, Daniel J. Watts, and Donald Webber, Jr, all of whom not only play the inmates with remarkable verisimilitude, but show off their great character chops essaying roles from Hillary Clinton to other prison personnel to the friends and family of The Volunteer. This magnificent six does the work of dozens without breaking a sweat.
By Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
http://2st.com/shows/current-production/whorl-inside-a-loop
Cast
Derrick Baskin, Nicholas Christopher, Chris Myers, Ryan Quinn, Sherie Rene Scott, Daniel J. Watts, Donald Webber Jr.
Open/Close Dates
Opening 8/4/2015
Closing 9/27/2015
Box Office
212-246-4422
Theatre Info
Second Stage Theatre
307 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
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