Kill the Old Torture Their Young

REACH OUT Leonard Kraft and Bronwen Prosser try to connect.

Photo: Lee Miller

A filmmaker returns to his hometown to make a documentary about it. The TV exec who’s commissioned the film has trouble connecting with his daughter. A young woman tries to befriend the skittish old man who lives upstairs. An anger-prone aspiring actor asks the young woman out on a date. And a rock star traveling through, well, travels through.

On the surface, it’s easy to see why this 1998 work by Scottish playwright Harrower (Blackbird) would appeal to the Steep ensemble. The depiction of disconnected souls pinging off one another Grand Canyon–style recalls other sprawling, interlocking stories with which the company has found success. But Harrower’s meandering work doesn’t have much to say, really; he quickly establishes his thesis—that people’s lives are bleak because they’re waiting to be defined by others—and then runs out of gas. His characters’ actions feel unmotivated and unconvincing.

Walsh’s staging is handsome; Dan Stratton’s modular set, appropriately sterile and drab, gracefully transforms into an impressive number of configurations. But her cast seems unusually at sea for a Steep production; the actors don’t seem to have found a core of truth within Harrower’s roughly sketched population, and his language sounds unnatural in their mouths. Even the normally dependable Peter Moore, as filmmaker Robert, doesn’t appear to know what to make of his arc. The characters’ actions are as haphazard as their encounters.

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