Priscilla continued

A few more thoughts on Priscilla Dreams the Answer. First, the name of the director was Melanie Garber, I guess that's kind of an addendum. My other additional musings have to do with the script. I'd thought not too long ago, "I wonder if there is such a thing as a play that is too short?" Everybody has been to plays have been too long, far too often in fact this is a major problem with plays in general. I guess part of this is our the ADD addled go go nature of our society, and that we have limited attention spans, all that stuff, but also don't make sit still in one place for a really long period of time because that's uncomfortable, you know what I mean? Anyway as a rule I believe less is more, shorter is better. And Priscilla Dreams the Answer is a pretty short play, it's about an hour long, which I admire and enjoyed about the play. But... I almost wonder if this is a case of a play being too short by even five or ten minutes, during which time I would have liked more backstory or more of a sense of character behind the second lead character/romantic interest James (I think his character was named James? Right? Let's go with that). I found that his character was introduced, Priscilla follows him on the game shows she quirkily enjoys and which he bounces around and then he enters Priscilla's life and you know everything that happens in the play happens. He's an interesting character, but where we have a strong sense of who Priscilla is, and even her boss and the aliens all have motivations which I felt I had a grasp on, but James was... I hate to say it, a little two dimensional? He has this quirk that when he goes through this process of internal searching he can answer any question and the play doesn't explain how or why that is and I actually appreciated that about the text and he takes his greatest comfort in empty TV sound stages, sounds good. But I don't know, other then a desire for companionship and his quirky love of bubble wrap, what is it about Priscilla that he connects to? I'm not really sure.

Overall I felt the play to be a collection of components all very artfully put together with strong characterizations, well written dialogue, I mean everything is good. But it didn't feel original, it felt like a pastiche of quirkiness and existential crises. And today, I figured it out, KURT VONNEGUT! Science fiction? Check. Humanism in the face of absurdisty? Check. Quirky characters? Check. It's like a very artfully adapted and staged but lost Kurt Vonnegut short story. This isn't really a criticism, but an observation. However I do feel that the most lasting pieces of drama are essentially original in some way, but I what do I really know.