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Mockingbird Members Pick
Price: $20
Adapted by Julie Jensen from Kathryn Erskine's National Book Award-winning novel of the same name, Mockingbird is brought with great flair to the local stage by Pygmalion Theatre Co.—not "flair" in the sense of excessive or ornamental flash, but an elegance and sweep that belies the small-minded notion that tastefulness and conscientiousness must be inherently dry or plain. Tracy Callahan's direction flows organically and keeps up a brisk pace while giving individual scenes their chance to land dramatically. And there is a lot of drama: The story focuses on Caitlin, a fifth-grade girl with Asperger's Syndrome, struggling to come to emotional terms with the aftermath of a school shooting in which her brother and others of his peers were killed. Her classmates—and, closer to home, her father—are all reeling in ways that seem entirely foreign to her. That natural conflict drives the play, anchored by the perfectly calibrated performance Camrey Bagley (pictured) gives as Caitlin. She pulls off the tremendously difficult feat of playing a character with a very pronounced kind of otherness without ever veering into caricature, all while still conveying Caitlin's extreme precociousness and periodic razor-sharp wit. The rest of the ensemble serves, by turns, as Greek chorus, scenery and a more general sense of a larger swirling incomprehensibility. Occasionally, they cohere into discrete characters; Robert Scott Smith stands out as Caitlin's grieving father. Mockingbird is a great example of staging as text in theater and is an entertaining and emotionally rewarding play to boot. (Danny Bowes)
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Rose Wagner Center
- 138 W. 300 South, Salt Lake City SLC-Downtown Utah 84101
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801-355-2787
- www.arttix.org
