Hunter Gatherers

By J. Cooper Robb
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 10, 2009

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Theatre Exile, Philly’s home for dark comedy, opens their season with director Deborah Block’s fierce staging of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s vicious farce Hunter Gatherers.

Sort of a Lord of the Flies set among the 30-something set, Gatherers takes place in the apartment belonging to Pam (Amanda Schoonover) and Richard (Ross Beschler). The occasion is the annual visit from their high school chums Wendy (the brilliant Sarah Sanford) and her doctor-husband Tom (Matt Pfeiffer).  For dinner Richard is serving lamb, which isn’t unusual. Except that he insists on slitting the throat of a live sheep on the dining room floor.

It doesn’t take long to deduce that the couples are mismatched and sure enough the primal Wendy and Richard are screwing behind the backs of their more demure partners. Tom and Pam eventually also release their stifled passions and soon people are beating each other with raw lamb and battling over Richard’s semen.

The play would be more appealing if we actually liked any of these people, but Nachtrieb seems to have little interest in arousing our sense of empathy.  Instead in this wickedly dark comedy he is content to show us two couples avoiding the complacency of middle age by reverting not to the joys of youth (though their hormonal urges make a horny teenager seem frigid by comparison), but the savagery of their more animalistic selves.

 

Through Nov. 22. $15-$30. The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St. 215.218.4022. theatreexile.org
 

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