8
Jan/13

COIL: THERE THERE

8
Jan/13

Kristen Kosmas is beguiling as a proofreader forced into replacing Christopher Walken in a one-man Chekhov show in THERE THERE (photo by Paul Willis)

KRISTEN KOSMAS: THERE THERE
The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th Ave. LIC
January 5, 9-12, $20
718-482-7069
www.ps122.org/coil-2013
www.chocolatefactorytheater.org

Kristen Kosmas is one of those mesmerizing performers who could delight audiences simply by reading the phone book. In her latest work, however, Kosmas delves into something just a little bit more complicated. In There There, she plays a proofreader named Karen who suddenly has to substitute for Christopher Walken when the Oscar-winning actor falls off a ladder and is unable to present his one-man show based on Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. So Karen is forced to go on, accompanied by Leo (actress and painter Larisa Tokmakova, who also appeared in Kosmas’s Palomino), a Russian translator who speaks just a split second behind Karen’s dialogue. In a room featuring two rows of chairs on either side, the action takes place in the space between them and at a podium as Kosmas gracefully goes back and forth between the characters of Karen and Vassily Vasilyevich Solyony, the army captain who gets in a duel with Baron Nikolaj Lvovich Tuzenbach over the love of Irina Sergeyevna Prozorova. Surrounded by prints of Russian Constructivist paintings and a wall of portraits of aristocratic military men, Kosmas (Hello Failure) explores the nature of character, desire, obsession, language, communication, and performance itself in a breezy seventy-five minutes. She regularly uses her warm, welcoming eyes to make direct contact with audience members, luring them in to her fractured narrative that even includes a brief foray into Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Goin’ Out of My Head.” “I want you to want me / I need you so badly / I can’t think of anything but you,” Karen softly sings, her back to the audience, the song as much about the captain’s desire for Irina as Kosmas’s connection to the crowd. Directed by Paul Willis, who previously helmed Kosmas’s The Scandal! and Chapter of Accidents, the extraordinary There There continues January 9-12 at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City as part of the eighth annual COIL Festival presented by PS122.