Sitting in the lobby at intermission for Nomad Motel, a woman and her companion were waiting for the elevator. They were leaving (and maybe a dozen more followed). She turned to him and said, “this isn’t just bad. This is phenomenally bad.” I was in agreement at that point. What did she miss? The second act was worse.
Carla Ching’s play is a cliche ridden amalgam of awkwardly unnatural dialogue. Towards the end of the play, the obviously bored audience seemed to bond while laughing at the play and rolling their eyes. Ed Sylvanus Isklander’s direction dragged on and on. The last twenty minutes feel like hours.
Yu-Hsuan Chen’s set attempted to provide a generic space to represent the various locations. Like the play, the design grabbed an idea and abandoned it quickly. Manually operated curtains were used to change scenes in the beginning. Throughout much of the play afterward, cast members sort of clean up the scattered props when scenes are finished. When Mom is leaving her daughter once again, she’s taking crates to a car. In this staging, she’s not really doing that. Instead, she’s handing them through a door to someone offstage.
Believable details are not a strong suit in the direction of this play. Two young people have no money and are squatting in a former store. They can make grilled cheese with an electric sandwich press. He prepares one and splits it with his ex-girlfriend. They engage in dialogue. Neither finishes their portion of food despite not having eaten all day. We watch him clean up and throw the remaining sandwiches in the trash. Is there any acting – or direction – going on? Why is there electricity in an abandoned store? Nothing which occurs on this stage is remotely worthy of your time.
A mother and her daughter are living with her unseen brothers in a motel having lost their house. The mom (Samantha Mathis) is a train wreck. Daughter Alix (Molly Griggs) is a good student with dreams of college. Struggling with poverty and having to work as a waitress to support deadbeat Mom, she inexplicably also has so much street smarts that she can fence anything for cash. The role is an impossible ask for any actress. Ms. Griggs is not believable in the role and adds no layers to horrifically banal lines.
A nerdy kid lives nearby in a big house but there are also money problems. His largely absent father calls him from Hong Kong to maintain control. Dad disappears for long stretches. He has a dangerous job, likely criminal. Mason (Christopher Larkin) finds a bird and is nursing it to health. The relationship is domineering Asian father and sensitive musician son. They clash. Dad (Andrew Pang) alternates between mean alcoholic thug and wisecracking droll comedian. He wants to toughen his son up “so he’s not a runt sucking on my teat when he’s thirty.” The son’s view is “I don’t want to spend my life moving money around.” When the fight finally happens, it is preposterous. If you left early, you will have missed that!
There’s another friend Oscar (Ian Duff) who has been tossed on the streets again from a never ending series of foster homes. He is aggressively jealous of the largely studious relationship between Alix and Mason. At no point does any of this artificial tension make any sense. When staying with Oscar in the rundown storefront, Alix lights luminaria to photograph her next new home with more aesthetically pleasing lighting.
Points are made about bad parenting and children’s survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. “Maybe some people were never designed to have children.” The cliches in the script are too voluminous to make you care about themes. When the Guns and Roses song “Sweet Child O’ Mine” started playing, I laughed. Was that the intention? If the moment was meant to be serious, it was an epic fail.
Nomad Motel is probably closer to an independent film than a play. Long music interludes are added to the overly precious visual moments. When Alix and Mason are running from their past (with their parents still awkwardly onstage), you are watching an unfunded movie not an intelligently staged play. When you see a lot of theater, there are some clunkers experienced along the way. This one, from the Atlantic Theater Company, is beyond awful. The lady who exited early didn’t need to see the second act to make the correct call.
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