The Other Americans at The Public Theater had a promising start, and I very much enjoyed Act 1. John Leguizamo, who is also the playwright, was very funny from the moment the show started. I knew I was coming in to a heavy play, so I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of comic relief. But the script has major issues in Act 2, which I will discuss below.
I liked the set, but I observed many sightline issues. I was in the center a bit stage right, so I only had a few sightline issues. I was also feeling fortunate to be higher up, as I observed sightline issues for folks lower (unless perhaps dead center). There were also scenes where only one side of the theatre could see a character’s face during that scene. The rest of the theatre could only see the back of the head.
I also liked the sound design, lighting design, and costumes. In short, I felt like this was overall a high quality production.
At intermission, I was feeling very positive about the show. In my view, there is really just one fatal playwright choice in Act 2 that ruined the show for me. Without giving spoilers, I will just say a victim in the story experiences an extreme tragedy that is just not necessary to the story, and it ruins the audience’s evening, since we have empathy for this victim character. The playwright has already successfully made the points of the story without this extreme event. If the play were a true story, I could give it a pass. And I do know the extreme event does happen and is realistic, but a benefit of fiction is that the playwright can balance the level of heaviness in the story, in order to make sure audiences will still want to come. I am all for heavy stories, and in fact, my shows the past three nights were all heavy stories (Cabaret, Punch, and The Outsiders). My all-time favorite musical is a heavy story, Hadestown, which always makes me cry. But this play just does not find that balance and instead causes patrons to feel horrible for the rest of the show and for the rest of the evening. I have some suggestions below.
One possible change is just changing this tragic event to instead be an unsuccessful attempt, which would have the same impact but without ruining everyone’s evening. And then I could be telling everyone to go see this show instead of saying that I regret going. Going to theatre still needs to be an enjoyable event at the end of the day.
Another possible change is to add more post-tragedy recovery story, but then other parts would need to be cut to keep the time the same. I did really like that the rest of the family moved forward towards the end of the story, and perhaps another way to find balance would be to play up this part of the story more. If the story had more balance with the family growing and healing from the tragedy, then perhaps the audience recovers. We just weren’t given enough recovery. We either need a less severe tragedy or more recovery story. Or ideally both! The other family members moving on is the recovery piece, but it is too quick, and we are still stunned.
I did feel like the production quality and the acting were excellent.
Perhaps the script will get tweaked given the audience feedback. I do feel like there is much potential here.
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