Never Fall In Love With a Writer, produced by local company Current Productions, is a one-woman show about a granddaughter learning of her grandmother’s lovers and the titular life lesson.
Should you see it?
Never Fall in Love With a Writer is a one-woman show atypically written by a man. (Most one-woman shows I can recall have been self-created.) It is about a young woman learning from her grandmother why you should, in the words of her grandmother before her, never fall in love with a writer.
I wish I could say otherwise, but this show never grabbed me at all. There’s some nice prose, sure, but not once did it gain my interest enough to want to know where it was going to go or what was going to happen next. I think that’s because nothing did happen, really. We hear about the grandmother’s brief affair with a writer named Samuel, and see a bit of her relationship with the young lady’s grandfather (not Samuel), but that’s kind of it. There are certainly no goals at play, nothing anybody is trying to accomplish, nothing getting in the way of that. There just wasn’t anything to latch on to, which made this feel more like a poetic piece of short prose than it did a dramatic piece of theatre.
Maybe it would have worked better as a two-hander. Not to take anything away from Jennifer Capogreco who has a lovely sweetness on stage and who did a capable job, but having a male actor to act opposite would have given two important things to Never Fall in Love with a Writer that it was missing. First, it would have created some chemistry to draw people into the love story (ostensibly the central tenet of the play). Second, it would have prevented any loss of pacing caused by Capogreco’s shifting between characters, which wasn’t always seamless.
But that’s just my opinion and I’d love to know what you thought? Did I miss the point entirely? Did Jennifer Capogreco and Never Fall in Love with a Writer have you enamored? Tell me in the comments below.
For more information about Never Fall in Love with a Writer, check out our preview article.
About Allan Mackey
Allan Mackey is editor-in-chief of Production Ottawa, which, really, is too fancy a title. He also acts as show producer for Should You See It, making sure you get your answer in just about two minutes every time. He writes stuff and occasionally turns that stuff into movies. Keep being awesome!
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