"Why do people use dating apps?" is investigated in Kenneth Jones's Ten Minutes on a Bench which ended its short run at the Wetumpka Depot last Friday. This disarmingly entertaining "developmental production" was previously workshopped in Florida and New York, so it is still a "Work in Progress", and with judicious editing and stronger focus is close to being a finished product.
In an attempt to tick all the boxes -- age, narcissism, hook-ups, LGBTQ+, disease, death, alcohol, job insecurity, gender stereotypes, technology, fanciful expectations, et al. -- the play's seventeen short scenes' common denominator is "loneliness", a subject that attentive audiences figure out early in its two-hour stage time.
Jones [Alabama Story and Hollywood Nebraska]. allows for flexible casting to accommodate age and gender, and director Tony Davison wisely casts four men and four women to play multiple roles that highlight their skills in creating an array of distinct characters while emphasizing the ensemble nature of such a dramatic convention. -- Sydney Burdette, Isaac Garrison, Renee Lewis, Seth Maggard, Laura Smith, Todd Tasseff, James Ward, and Jean Webb comprise the multi-talented acting company whose rapid-fire naturalistic speech and commitment to each personality keep the action moving from scene to scene. [On closing night, one line of dialogue literally stopped the show.]
An experiment in launching a new Dating App conscripts a group of strangers who agree to meet on a public park bench for a ten-minute meeting with another member of the group, with no specific expectations, and several rules to follow: they must agree to share their personal details, be honest with one another, make no commitments or arrangements to meet again, no touching except for a handshake, and stay for no less and no more than the allotted ten minutes. Imagine the complications.
A lone park bench serves as the set for all the scenes that take place in a variety of towns and cities; and the characters and their situations and purposes show a lot of familiar tropes of people trying to connect with one another. -- Jones has an ear for truthful dialogue and quirks of character; each scene is entertaining in its own right, and could stand alone as a complete vignette; but it goes on for too long. It needs to be more compact; perhaps with fewer scenes and no intermission Ten Minutes on a Bench could make a stronger impact.
