Review Preview: When Something Wonderful Ends

Playwrights Theatre premiered the final play of its 2006-07 main stage season last night. Playwright Sherry Kramer was in attendance for the New Jersey premiere of her one-woman play, "When Something Wonderful Ends," an absorbing, informative and very interesting work.

Kramer's quite a writer, and has fashioned something of a documentary in dramatic clothing. Actress Bonnie Black representing, presumably, the playwright, does the heavy lifting, playing Sherry, a baby boomer back home to sort through the remnants of her life following the passing of her mother. Taking inventory of her old toys, in particular, her prized collection of Barbie dolls and accessories, Sherry's nostalgia trip detours into a history lesson, mostly involving America's lust for oil and how it, ironically, inspired and ultimately funded the fundamentalist Muslim nation which we are now at war with.

Kramer works history like a prize fighter, bobbing, weaving, jabbing and throwing the occasional haymaker at our arrogant willingness to invade oil rich countries, depose their leaders (righteous or otherwise) and cheat them out of fair profits.

Politically speaking, she leans as far left as Al Gore on a warm day in January, hurling one inconvenient truth after another at her audience. Whichever side of the fence you lean on, she makes a strong argument for us to, metaphorically, "grow up, put our toys away" and make the sacrifices we know we must to make a better world.

But Kramer is so caught up in her own truth that she overlooks the medium of her message, and forgets to entertain her audience. Black, who looks and sounds much like Mary McDonnell (Emmy and Oscar nominated co-star of "Dances With Wolves" and "Battlestar Galactica"), measures her speech and keeps her emotions in check--I kept hoping for a breakthrough or a breakdown, something we could relate to beyond useful information--but it never came. The play's considerable wit never crosses into comedy; touching stories about her family are moving, but seem to function as merely vehicles to help drive her agenda ever forward.

Then again, there is an audience for this sort of thing, as the man who "used to be the next president of the United States" has proven over the last year. And I'm sure I would enjoy sitting down and having a nice long talk with Sherry. But I can't say it was a magical night of theater.