Word: cindered
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Ringed by Baltimore narcotics cops and sniffling into a tissue, Antwan Davey looks like a kid caught in a bureaucratic land of giants. Just three hours earlier, the cops nailed the skinny 10-year-old boy in a playground drug bust. Now, in a cinder-block squad room in east Baltimore, he slouches in a green office chair, unlaced Etonic tennis shoes just touching the floor...
Director Henry Bial takes a weak and slightly cliched script and turns it into a engaging play. He transforms the dilapidated basement of Cabot into a convincing inner-city bus stop with the addition of cinder blocks and a graffiti-covered public telephone. The small space works to his advantage because it intensifies the actors' claustrophobia. Bial's blocking follows through on this theme--Joey and Murph circle each other as they chant their song and gradually encircle the Indian after stealing his picture...
...problematic for other reasons. The audience has just been successfully convinced that the basement of Cabot was an inner-city bus stop--the set for Fool for Love merely rearranges the cinder blocks into a sink and adds a bed and a table to represent May's motel room. In addition, the "special effects" fall flat. The audience must suppress giggles each time a character leaves the room and mashes his feet in the gravel off-stage...
Teachers get them instead. Attired in trim khaki-and-white uniforms, Moton youngsters between the ages of four and 11 work through reading and mathematics exercises and then at recess stampede out of the air-conditioned, cinder-block building to become blurs in the steamy 100 degrees heat. They are candid about their options. "If I was home, I'd just sit around," says fifth-grader Alkima Thomas...
...surface, David Eggar's production of West Side Story has a professional feel. Matt and Mark Buchanan's set works well. The multi-story freeway bridge which stretches across the stage looks great, and such neat gimmicks as a car on cinder blocks and a working video game have been placed on the stage. The orchestra is lively, and, as conducted by Roger Neill, it versatilely slips from a waltz to a salsa...