Obscure Questions

A new entry in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, Nancy Murray's Asking Questions studies the collapse of a lie. With a deft mixture of comedy and tragedy, the play probes the tormented relationship between a mother and daughter entangled in a deception over the fate of the daughter's father. But the eccentric direction of the drama at Fells Point Corner Theatre raises its own questions.

In Murray's drama, Meg (Shanna Babbidge) has long told her teenaged daughter Mandi (Julia Pickens) that her father had died in an automobile accident. As the play progresses, the lie unravels, with Mandi increasingly insistent on discovering the true identity of her father. Through a series of plot twists, the long-lost father Mark (Kevin Griffin Moreno) reappears. The play ends with the daughter finally meeting her father, who may or may not have conceived Mandi through an act of date rape. Enhancing the play's structure is the use of two shadow characters. Mandi's friend Jen (Erin Boots) entices Mandi into dangerous pub crawls that reproduce Meg's destructive behavior as a teenager herself. A flamboyant gay friend of Meg, Doug (Andrew Syropolous) provides comic relief to the play's dark action. A gifted comedian, Syropolous lights up the drama's funniest scene, Doug's encounter with Mark as a bogus census-taker.

Peter Davis's opaque direction of the work does little to evoke the emotional depths in this piece of psychological realism. At key moments in the play, starting with an obscure mime at the very beginning, Meg seems to preside over the action from a velvety throne. Why this tormented woman is presented as such a regal figure remains unclear. In early scenes, the actors' words are punctuated by sitcom laugh tracks. Why? Throughout the play, the action is suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of chirping birds. Why? The one successful surreal touch of the evening are the Dali-esque flats designed by Heather Joi. The direction itself feels gratuitously surreal and some of the basic work of the director (such as getting actors to speak slowly enough for their lines to be heard by the audience) remains undone.