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It's a messy matter, trust, and Scott and Scanlan, reuniting at Second Stage after their 2009 musical Everyday Rapture, don't shy away from it, even as they also don't embrace it openly. It's clear from the opening scene, in which an attractive female (Scott) is being wrung through the security rollers at the high-security prison at which she's volunteering in upstate New York, that nothing even the most obvious of situations is not likely to be what it should be, or what we'd expect. Wayne, the fingerprinter who's recording the volunteer's digits (just in case), has seen his share of unusual hand markings. "I know about Peacock's Eyes," he says: "whorl inside a loop. Characteristics: Loyal, loving, trustworthy, capable of extreme acts of kindness.... Also manipulative, amoral, narcissistic, sociopathic with criminal tendencies." "It's either/or," the volunteer argues. "It's also," Wayne responds. "You can't be that good and that bad at the same time."
Each of the other men—Rick (Nicholas Christopher), Source (Ryan Quinn), Flex (Daniel J. Watts), and Bey (Donald Webber, Jr.)—has his own story, and the volunteer becomes enamored of all of them. Though she's only there to teach a 12-week theatre class called "Theatricalizing the Personal Narrative," she sees a greater opportunity. As a Broadway actress currently enmeshed in a popular horror called Conquistadors The Musical! (a "female Man of La Mancha... with guns"), she's longing for a project that will energize her and be important, and the prisoners may provide that. Too bad the stories she's helping them bring into the world will never be heard outside the prison's walls... Or might that be possible after all? You can probably sense where this is going. Whorl Inside a Loop doesn't collapse as it gets increasingly wrapped up in this plot, but it does lose a bit of its distinctiveness. Structured as sort of a Scared Straight–style performance-art piece, it features the male actors playing—quite convincingly, I might add—subsidiary characters ranging from Wayne to a nun to a prospective producer to the volunteer's impatient husband, on an unforgiving cinderblock set (by Christine Jones and Brett Banakis) that traps you right in there with them. Scanlan and his codirector Michael Mayer keep the atmosphere appropriately oppressive, even hopeless, while ensuring breakneck pacing and near-instantaneous transitions between locales, as well as between cutting drama and sweeping comedy, to emphasize the sky-high degree to which anything can go in this universe. You expect all this resolve into something a bit more engrossing than a narrative about artistic ownership and interpersonal respect, and it doesn't quite there. The Scott and Scanlan obviously have bigger things in mind, a too-comical nature, if conceptually justified, dilutes the seriousness too much. Plus, after we've established who's who and why they're all here (and not always for the reasons you might think), the route to the conclusion is circuitous, and alternating scenes of the volunteer's duplicity and the men's bland protestations do not make for compelling scenery along the way. That ending, though (which won't be given away here) is an example of the show at its best: a complex exploration of the relationship between who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we present ourselves to the world. The male actors uniformly understand this and do excellent work that highlights the numerous contradictions within this framework. Baskin and Myers provide particularly sensitive portrayals of complicated souls, and Quinn puts a keen comic spin on his out-of-sorts Muslim inmate. Somewhat less successful is Scott, whose work is effective within its boundaries but sticks a bit closer to the surface and doesn't show us the same depth of confliction we get from the men. The moral is that everyone is confined, just by different bars, and that freedom, like identity, has no universal meaning. When the shackle with which you're bound is who you are at your core, can you escape it? What's more, should you? Everyone we meet here faces this, even those whose personalities seem clearer-cut than the volunteer's or Sunnyside's, and those struggles are indeed enough to drive the play. But with so much to ponder and so little point, we need a cleaner, sharper journey to where we're going. The prisoners have essentially an infinity to ponder the nuances and intricacies of what they're doing. We have much less time to waste, even in pursuit of Whorl Inside a Loop's noble, fascinating idea.
Whorl Inside a Loop
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