"A Devil Inside" Reviewed

Posted on July 02, 2008

devilinside.jpgWide Eyed's A Devil Inside has been reviewed on nytheatre.com, and the review casts even more light on the ambitiousness of mounting this David Lindsay-Abaire script:

Lindsay-Abaire's plot is a ridiculously tangled web in which everyone and practically every event, past and present, is connected. A laundromat owner who wears a sash of sad mementos demands that her 21 year-old son avenge the murder of his father while a nihilistic Russian Literature professor plots the death of a "dull" repairman who sees a laughing devil in the patterns on the wallpaper. Meanwhile a giddy student in love with the professor attempts to seduce him while his foot-loving ex-wife tries to locate an old memento that is her luckiest charm. This is really just the starting point—from here so many plot points unfold that it's like watching an origami swan being deconstructed.

Lindsay-Abaire's script is very funny though not everyone will think so because it is so very quirky. I love his humor. It reminds me of the type of humor that you'd find on TV shows like Arrested Development. His characters are bizarre and their actions and motivations are unpredictable. He plants what appear to be symbols throughout the story—such as severed feet and dismal mementos—but they don't have any real connections to anything. Dreams become reality and reality dreams as every mention of an event, no matter how much you may think it's just a joke, turns out to be true. I also really enjoyed the parallels he draws from Russian novels such as Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina.

 

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