At only 70 minutes long, there’s a lot to love about Urbanite Theatre’s production of "Athena."
Written by Gracie Gardner and directed by Urbanite’s own Summer Dawn Wallace, the play is a chatty exploration of the budding friendship between a pair of unlikely fencing partners narratively destined to become adversaries. Lea Sevola and Emma Giorgio star.
Under Wallace’s astute direction, the production takes full advantage of the blackbox experience and does it with style. Once the entry door shuts and that white seam of light disappears into the black, you’re in it—ringside and within striking distance of the epee-wielding stars of the show, who prowl, retreat, stroll and strut up and down a thin strip of stage that bisects the audience. It’s a deft use of in-the-round presentation that transforms dialogue into action, as the audience institutes its own whip-pans, swiveling their ocular camera from one end of the stage to the other, following the conversation like a professional tennis match.
(For full effect, go for a front row seat near the center. Fight if you have to.)
And at its best, the show clips along like Aaron Sorkin with swords, as Sevola and Giorgio probe, parry, deflect and even attack at rapid-fire speed with wit and power. When consumed by this verbal choreography, the actors and the production shine. The whole thing crackles and the characters come alive.
Sevola impresses in the title role, playing a character that could easily fall into the cliché, but with enough nuance to imbue even the little moments with something multifaceted. The character claims that she wants to be a mystery and the actor delivers. It’s a compelling performance and the primary engine for the first third of the show at least. Giorgio is necessarily placed in a more passive position at the start, but plays it to a T, convincing as the foil to Sevola’s bravado. The latter half of the show is where Giorgio truly gets to flex her muscles, as the character becomes more assertive or at least less timid.
But "Athena"s relatively brief runtime is either its best friend or its worst enemy.
On the one hand, it’s pretty dang hard to overstay your welcome at just 70 minutes. And there’s beauty and confidence in the way Gardner’s story unfolds at breakneck pace, with time jumps dissolving between scenes and nary a moment when both women are not onstage.
In some regard, this skip-and-jump sketchwork of the characters’ arcs enhances the dramatic irony of their inevitable confrontation and the universality of the story’s bittersweet conclusion. But that same element, which can give a story the same poignancy of a life’s memory, can also undercut the fullness of character—something innate in memory but that must be built in fiction. In the case of "Athena," the sketchwork remains too much a skeleton, with reliance on broad strokes hobbling what could have been a richer exploration of the characters—and one that would more readily earn the transformation at the end.
Oddly enough, one of the only places where the play really slows down is during the climactic bout, but the rules of the competition are so unexplained that it’s hard to care about any of it except the ending. The actors sell victory or defeat with each point scored, but, absent knowledge of the structure of the competition, it’s like watching a basketball game without a scoreboard or a timer. The points float without context and I found myself first wondering if I was supposed to be keeping score in my mind and then just waiting for them to tell me who won.
In the end, inspired direction from Wallace and compelling performances from Sevola and Giorgio entertain and engage but ultimately cannot fully elevate a script that leaves much to be desired. There’s an emotional punch, and you definitely feel it, but I can’t help thinking that it could have been a knockout blow with stronger source material.
