THE THEATRE :OUT OF THE DARKNESS

“Your Own Personal Exegesis” and “Ohio State Murders.”

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

 

God, it’s dark out. Going to plays these days is like looking at a painting by Jane Dickson, whose work chronicles an older, more dangerous, less commercially anesthetized Times Square. By the late afternoon, the palette of the street is all black sky and bright lights, neon ref lected in smears on puddled pavement. In this slogging terrain, the lights of the theatre feel like promises of warmth to come. It’s nice to trudge inside, even in a gloomy mood, and warm your hands by drama’s hearth.

Julia May Jonas’s very funny, often moving new play, “Your Own Personal Exegesis,” directed by Annie Tippe at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre, starts out at just this time of year. It’s Christmas Eve, at a church whose full name we never learn, in a more or less well-off, implicitly suburban town in New Jersey. "Redacted Church, in Redacted, New Jersey," the church's youth pastor, Rev Kat (Hannah Cabell), calls it in a sermon. Those redactions, and others that pop up throughout the play's text-we never, for instance, learn any of the main characters' last names give it the feeling of an ardent but guarded memory. The show and its author seem to want to both confess and protect, perform and be private, all at once.