‘Monsters of the American Cinema’ Review: Monster High
metroweekly.comConstellation’s intriguing Incognito, Gerrad Alex Taylor deftly inhabits just one memorable character in Christian St. Croix’s moving Monsters of the American Cinema (★★★★☆), a Prologue Theatre production at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.By the look and sound of this evocative, regional premiere, staged by Prologue artistic director Jason Tamborini, the playwright put that character firmly on the page.
Remy Washington (Taylor) is someone we haven’t met onstage: a gay Black single stepdad raising his deceased white husband’s increasingly unruly teenage son Pup (Fletcher Lowe), with whom Remy operates the drive-in movie theater he also inherited.St.
Croix, who is queer and Black, workshopped the play partly with Prologue before its 2022 world premiere at ArtsWest in Seattle, and renders the circumstances of this loving alternative family with affecting specificity and a night-scented air of melancholy.Both are captured in the production’s tempo, in Nadir Bey’s detailed set for the mobile home Remy and Pup share in Santee, California, and in the lived-in, often testy guardian-teen rapport conveyed by Taylor and Lowe.
Between and in the midst of scenes, Remy and Pup take turns addressing the audience to paint the picture of their idiosyncratic existence, and to narrate the mounting conflict that threatens their enduring closeness.Since 16-year-old Pup was a pup, the pair have bonded like pals over the classic monster movies and musicals that make up the fare at Brian’s Good Time Drive-In.
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