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She’s like the female version of Benjamin Button, except with things like drinking liquor before beer. She’s been doing things out of order her whole life. Please excuse my dear aunt sally how to#It happened last weekend, and I don’t even know how to rationalize it, except to say that neither math nor morality are her strong suit.īefore I tell you the specifics of her crime, from my objective perspective, let me explain a little bit about Sally. The 99-Seat Beat: The latest from L.A.My dear aunt Sally did something inexcusable. Review: Open Fist’s ‘Walking to Buchenwald’Īlex Alpharaoh put his own DACA story onstage Review: ‘Head of Passes’ at the Mark Taper Forum Please excuse my dear aunt sally free#SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter me THEATER: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally’ But it’s Piper’s invigorating incarnation of an eager-to-please phone, a computerized buddy as helpful as it is ultimately helpless, that powers the production. Armento’s language has a rhythmic vibrancy that creates its own universe, which is accentuated by Smith’s nifty sound design. It’s impossible to predict how the story will unfold. There’s nothing by the numbers about “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,” which follows neither the rules of dramaturgy nor morality. (The teacher, less creepy than the inappropriate school secretary of Tommy Smith’s “Firemen,” remains sketchy.) ![]() Instead, he sympathizes with this young man’s lonely plight, seeing Red as a casualty of his parents’ bitter divorce - a mother who starts her drinking earlier and earlier each day and a father who can’t let go of his resentment. Armento is aware of the damage that’s being done to Red, but he doesn’t editorialize on what is in fact a criminal act. The tale is sensitively handled, though I felt troubled by the realization that this wouldn’t at all fly if the teacher were male and the student were female. Please excuse my dear aunt sally series#Still adjusting to cohabiting with her unemployed boyfriend who’s supposed to be working on a new app but spends his afternoons deflecting shame for not pulling his weight, she explores the kid’s unlocked phone while hiding out in the bathroom and becomes infatuated after discovering a series of artful photos of rock towers. (The sentient device, which at times seems as unaccountably omniscient as the narrator of a Victorian novel, reacts like a kidnapped basset hound.) The teacher’s motivations are fuzzy, complicated and clearly libidinous. The teacher weirdly slips the phone into her purse and takes it home with her. (The play’s title is a mnemonic device to help students handle complex equations.) Red McCray, friendless and disaffected, acts like a smart aleck in math class after his phone goes off while his algebra teacher is explaining the order of operations. The story that this hyper-alert phone is tracking centers on its young owner, a 15-year-old high school student who has transferred to a new school in Orange County after his parents’ divorce. Emotion isn’t beyond his repertoire, but he’s helpless to act on his feelings. He’s better at what he does than human beings but there are strict limits to what he can do. Large of frame and dressed in a futuristic jacket and slacks, without shoes and socks, the character exists in some liminal world between man and machine. Here there are two actors, one of whom speaks (Thomas Piper, billed as the Narrator) and another (Adam Smith) who remains silent, a youthful presence sitting at a desk behind a scrim as he conducts the show’s soundscape.Īs the narrating phone, Piper speaks in a manner that’s too distinct for the assembly line. ![]() The playwright has stipulated that the play can be done by several actors (as it was, to strong reviews, in New York) or by a single performer. Kevin Armento’s “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,” which opened last weekend at the Odyssey Theatre, is a clever drama narrated by a phone that sounds nothing at all like Siri. Our phones have become so entwined in our lives it was only a matter of time before one became a stage protagonist. ![]()
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