Nicole Jacobs (lovely Cassie Delicath) has disappeared, and her older sister Crystal (always delightful Miranda McGee) sits an insomniac’s vigil with the stuffed-animal memorial every night, the dark obfuscating the gaze of the perpetually encamped news van cameras. Nicole’s disappearance has become a national sensation à la Nancy Grace. Nicole’s teen boyfriend Daniel (charming Henry Eden) shows up one night to add an item to his own secret stuffed-animal memorial, and this Southern Gothic grief story begins.
In addition to sitting vigil, Crystal attempts to manage her fear about the details of Nicole’s unsolved disappearance by obsessively reading fairy tales and other accounts of what seems to be a massive canon of kidnapping and torture porn. Daniel makes maps. If he can map out Nicole’s room, if he can map out the town, if he can map out past and present, perhaps he will be able to make sense of things.
All the while, Nicole recedes. In one particularly poetic monologue, we understand the marrying of a body into the earth. That moment lingers in me still. Without the body, the 24-hour news cycle is free to re-fabricate Nicole’s identity repeatedly, a constant projection of what each of us fears most.
Daniel and Crystal develop a curiously intimate relationship in the dark nights of grief, one that made me squirm a bit. In the periwinkle dawn, I am instead pondering the fact that neither eels falling from the sky nor a murdered teen seemed out of the ordinary when the relationship of two humans who loved another did.
This year’s Fringe sets a hard stop on productions at 60 minutes, and I felt that some trimming might have helped the actors land some of the emotional nuances. But that’s a hard call to make when you have a script in hand by Trey Tatum, a rich storyteller. There is some sound bleed from the upstairs venue in the beautifully renovated Memorial Hall, but the rest of the Hall’s amenities make up for it.
The CINCINNATI FRINGE FESTIVAL continues through June 11. Find CityBeat reviews of 41 early performances here. For a full schedule and more info about Fringe, visit cincyfringe.com.
