Martel's Vanish-ing Act

By Julie Armstrong     3/26/09 7:00pm

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martel College Theatre's I Took My Gun and Vanished has much in common with its director-playwright, Martel senior Alexander Crompton. Both Crompton and the original production now showing at his college are hip, nonchalantly ambitious, funny, long-winded and - in the words of Kyle, the character Crompton plays - "not really representative."While the five-person show reflects a variety of personalities found in the liberal early-20-something world, its format is what makes it unique among recent Rice theater. Featuring countless short scenes, jump cuts, extreme realism and no clear plot, I Took My Gun and Vanished resembles a TV show or a movie more than it does a play.

The show's most novel draw is its use of jump cuts. The quick temporal leaps add humor, allow flexibility and simultaneity and appeal to the attention-deficit, quick-browsing minds of the Internet generation, adding more freshness and youth to a show already brimming with sex, drugs, alcohol, iTunes, Facebook and spiritual crises.

Still, these jump scenes can be distracting for viewers easily taken out of the world of the play. Brief and awkward shifts of bodies in darkness do little for momentum. Ultimately, the jumps will appeal to viewers who do not mind remembering they are watching a play, while others may feel frustrated.

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The show bills itself as "a play about religion and sexuality." While it clearly centers on those two topics, it fails to unite them in a major way. Lacking a driving plot or obvious climax and ending without evoking sympathy for the characters or asking an identifiable question, I Took My Gun and Vanished instead serves as a commendably realistic vessel for the playwright's own cloudy musings, like an odd mix of Virginia Woolf or J.D. Salinger excerpts with several episodes of a comedy-drama.

Nevertheless, the script is downright funny, often dryly so, and the cast has no weak links. Every actor's performance is natural, and the lines often flow smoothly enough to seem improvised. The characters - especially Wiess senior Khrista Rypl's vacant Vicky, Hanszen freshman Morgan Black's unlikeably insecure and irrational Isadore and Crompton's portrayal of the haughty, emotionally unavailable but still needy Kyle - create humor simply through their realness and familiarity of the awkward and immature predicaments in which they find themselves.

Light and sound director Mark Hoffman (a Martel sophomore) also deserves kudos for his adept management of the show's generous sound effects and shifting soundtrack. The audience hears only the music the characters hear, but because the characters propel their lives with music, this use of sound works well.

I Took My Gun and Vanished is truly entertaining, especially for a liberal-minded college audience. Viewers should not expect a constant suspension of disbelief, nor acting that inspires awe. They should, however, expect charmingly human interactions in a production whose novel format intrigues, whose simple but well-planned set and sound provide stimulation for the eyes and ears, and whose thematic content - if often expressed in long and clichéd exchanges - provides occasional food for thought and a rest from the more focus-draining medium of linear, plot-based theater and larger casts.

Admission is free with suggested donations; students have no excuse not to attend the show's second and final weekend.

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