Room / Truck on a Roll

IN THE CLEARING STANDS A BOXER O'Reilly gets tough as Truck.

Photo: Colm O'Reilly

With her finely aged, jaunty voice, clipped diction and warm delivery style, Jenny Magnus sounds like a once-ballsy folk or jazz artist who’s gone soft to record a children’s album. Instead, though, she’s gently spitting out the complicated lyrics to a song with the refrain “They could not get each other off,” detailing in eerily Sondheim-like cadences the story of a couple whose neurotic psychological barriers create a sexual roadblock. It’s just one in a catalog of numbers that solo artist Magnus uses to riff on her theme—which is, roughly, I’m not sure why I’m here, why you’re here, or if we’re even actually here together at all—in Curious’s duo of monologues that have very different takes on existentialism. To watch Magnus is a beguiling pleasure, as she not only acknowledges her hypocrisies but seems to embrace them. (She tells us how much she loves her audience, then immediately insists on confiding how much we piss her off.)

While the amazing trick Magnus pulls off is her ability to make an entire monologue play seem like a single coherent sentence and 45 minutes seem like a bright flash, O’Reilly’s monologue about a crusty, aging boxer-loser allows for the passage of time to be felt, in part because you sense 20 minutes or so of Truck’s story could be truncated—especially considering how little actually happens to him. Yet O’Reilly’s uncompromising rawhide performance, his prose style (this character is a pugilist who doesn’t seem to know he’s also a poet), the always-present Curious influence of Beckett, and some fine multimedia work make it stick all the same. As the two plays run in rotating rep, Magnus asks you to wonder if life is worth living; on alternating nights, O’Reilly answers, Don’t count on it.—Christopher Piatt