Dead Unicorn Ink, by Patrice Forbes

With the advent of blockbuster superhero films and the MeToo movement, the place of women in these films and their original source material (comic books) is receiving ever greater scrutiny. A Girl in the Fridge, created and directed by Patrice Forbes and produced by Dead Unicorn Ink, attempts to investigate this very concern and bring awareness to how the media we consume influences our attitudes in real life. Centering around Eve (Forbes), a PhD student who is doing her dissertation on the treatment of women in comic books, the show is able to make its case without being overly preachy. While the show sometimes has Eve recounting statistics about the fates that various female characters face (her observation that comics offer a way for people to live out violent fantasies is particularly astute), it also lets these facts be played out in the story onstage rather simply stating them. …

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Reviewed by Ryan Pepper

Some dramatists create love letters to the things they admire. …like nobody’s watching doesn’t give the audience a love letter but an unhealthy delusion to the Tom Hanks classic Cast Away, and to castaway movies in general. This Robinsonade solo show by Jake Simonds is a cerebral production about the nature of loneliness.

The play opens with the bearded, curly-haired, scantily clad Simonds trying to start a fire the same way Tom Hanks does it in Cast Away. After toiling fruitlessly, his basketball begins talking to him. Pretty soon, the pair strikes up a conversation about Castaway. This play isn’t just a conscious Cast Away remake though, but a serious meditation upon the film. After the opening scene, Simonds addresses the audience directly as he discusses why Tom Hanks spends half of Cast Away off the desert island and in society, but that nobody ever seems to remember that, or care. This soliloquizing about the movie goes on for almost fifteen minutes, as he meticulously recreates the famous ‘rain scene’ from the end of the film, in which Tom Hanks’s character and his wife, now remarried, share one final kiss. …

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