Starving Artistry

Starving Artist Theatre Company, Road Movie at Independence Seaport Museum

Road Movie begins, ominously, with Eric Bogosian-style vituperations about bumper stickers and parking lot attendants who say "have a nice day." But then the play, the good writing (by British playwright Geoffrey Hamilton), and the powerful solo acting (by American actor Mark Pinkosh who, with Hamilton, constitutes Starving Artist Theatre Company) really begin. The story starts with a wide-eyed courtship (the word "seduction" just won't do) on a borrowed houseboat in Sausalito (Pinkosh playing both Joel the courted and Scott the courtier), and eventually carries the cynical Joel on a flight to New York and then along the Great American Highway back to California. Along the way there are a few more lapses into Bogosian land (a rant about cable TV in a motel in Desert Rock, CA), but there are also a few marvelous encounters - with places (the Vietnam Memorial in Washington) and, most remarkably, with a pot-smoking mom in a caftan passing out condoms at a gay pick-up site under a freeway in Atlanta. It's all about movement, love, parents who outlive their children, and friends who outlive their friends. And it's absolutely beautiful.

-Cary M. Mazer