Asheville Fringe Arts Festival: Halvsies
Writing a play is hard. Performing a play is hard. Doing both of those things with another person, when neither is allowed to see the other’s half of the play prior to the show, is a recipe for a trainwreck.
About a dozen late-night Asheville Fringe Arts Festival patrons were invited to watch the resulting collision at Tyger Tyger Gallery in Halvsies, a production of Chicago-based collective Memoriam Development. Actor/playwrights Nick Mataragas and Amanda Davilla explained the conceit before launching into their blindly co-written work, titled Alice in Zombieland.
Given the one-off nature of the show, the script had to be treated almost as disposable — a hastily assembled collection of pop culture references from sources like The Last of Us, TikTok filters, and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” all strung together in a drugged-out dream sequence à la Lewis Carroll. Mataragas and Davilla seemed to be going for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of so-bad-it’s-good aesthetic.
And, as with MST3K, the ridiculousness was meant to spark metacommentary on the proceedings. Moments when the actors broke character to snark at each other, like Mataragas expressing disbelief that Davilla’s big fight scene had devolved into the steps of the “Cha Cha Slide,” invited the crowd to laugh at the roughness of the play as much as at the action itself.
I found those moments of spontaneity to be too few and far between. The actors spent a lot of time looking down at their heretofore-unseen parts and not a lot of time riffing off the text to connect with the audience. The comic momentum seemed to stall over the basic mechanics of getting through the script.
Where that script broke down, there was humor: Davilla’s getting indignant over a missed prop cue, for example, or chiding Mataragas for trying to rush a dramatic pause. (“I’m sitting in the moment, Nick!”) But for me, the concept of Halvsies proved more compelling than the execution.
Halvsies plays again at Tyger Tyger Gallery 9 p.m. Saturday, March 25. Tickets are available at this link.
(Photos courtesy of Asheville Fringe Arts Festival)
