Theatre in Review: Tiny Dynamite (59E59)Somehow, one feels Abi Morgan must have viewed Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim several times before writing Tiny Dynamite, a story of friendship, triangular romance, and suicide. In any case, an air of romantic angst predominates. Morgan throws together a trio of troubled young people and gives them plenty of room to drink, flirt, and mock each other; she also invents a mysterious death to haunt them. However, the author, who has amassed some impressive credits recently -- she is best known for the films Shame and The Iron Lady, as well as the excellent BBC series The Hour -- is no Truffaut, and the result is unfortunate, to say the least. Tiny Dynamite leaves you with the impression that tragedy necessarily drives its survivors to behave in adorably quirky fashion. This is a portrait of grief drawn with smiley faces. Lucien and Anthony are lifelong friends in their late 20s. It appears that their roles -- Lucien is the responsible one, Anthony the madman -- were set on the long-ago day when Anthony was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. In the present, Lucien has a boring job in finance, while the childlike Anthony apparently does nothing at all. More to the point, he seems barely functional; Lucien has to tell him when to take a shower, and, when dining in public, correct his obstreperous behavior. On vacation, Lucien also handles all of their expenses and calls the shots. A triangle is formed with the appearance of Madeleine, a pretty, freewheeling drifter who happens to be passing through the area where Lucien and Anthony are staying. (The script is remarkably vague about the location; the dialogue includes a number of British locutions, but the actors employ American accents.) Soon, Madeleine is spending every free moment with them -- swimming, going to the movies, and drinking plenty of alcohol -- not really aware that she reminds them of the young woman they both loved, who fell -- or did she jump? -- from a bridge. This terrible event, which both men witnessed, could be the basis for a wrenching drama, but Tiny Dynamite is so schematically conceived that it feels more like a diagram than a play. No detail is too small to connect to the theme of personal responsibility in a universe ruled by chance. For example, Lucien can't simply be, say, a chartered accountant; he has to work in risk assessment. There's also that childhood incident, involving Anthony, lightning, and a mailbox. It's also part of the author's design that the men must become polar opposites. Lucien, the buttoned-up control freak, serves as surrogate parent to Anthony, who, we are told, has hit the skids, getting drunk, having sex with strangers, and sleeping it off in the gutter. (All of this is hard to credit, given the air of robust health radiated by Blake DeLong, who plays Anthony.) The death of their friend -- she is only referred to in self-consciously sensitive fashion as "the woman with a crooked nose" -- makes them behave in ways that have nothing to do with real mourning and everything to do with writerly conceits. (The characters love to refer to themselves in the third person, always a warning sign.) Among other things, Anthony likes to put bumblebees in his mouth, and he and Lucien like to pass the time reading out loud newspaper stories depicting bizarre and unexpected deaths. All of this might pay off if the play's central trauma were more powerfully evoked. Morgan offers no sense of what life was like for Anthony, Lucien, and their friend. For that matter, it's nearly impossible to grasp what Anthony and Lucien have seen in each other all these years. When the truth of the woman's death -- the terrible fact that is supposed to be eating them alive -- is finally revealed, my initial reaction was, that's what happened? Instead of justifying all the oddball behavior we've been witnessing, it's the final piece in a puzzle play that, for all its carefully wrought intimations of pain, feels entirely false. The director, Matt Torney, has made sure Tiny Dynamite has a nicely stylized production, and he has cast it fairly well. Christian Conn captures Lucien's crushing sense of responsibility and his frustration at having to be the adult all the time. Olivia Horton is aptly high-strung and totally in the moment as Madeleine; she keeps you guessing about her intentions regarding this odd couple. DeLong does what he can, but the character of Anthony is such a question mark -- Is he schizophrenic? Mentally disabled? Maimed by grief? -- that it's pretty much impossible to make sense of him. Maruti Evans' ingenious design places the action on an empty deck with the audience seated on two sides; on the walls opposite are sets of transparent lightbulbs that stand in for starry skies, fireflies, and movie screens, and help to signal various emotional states; as lit by Evans, it establishes a strongly melancholy mood using economical means. Nicole Wee's costumes are perfectly fine; Will Pickens' sound design makes extensive use of effects, including the buzzing of insects, thunderstorms, and the hum of electrical circuits, adding a much-needed sense of reality to these artificial proceedings. But the script is both too tidily conceived and lacking in any character-revealing detail to make any impact. In Tiny Dynamite, death is not a terrible loss, an unhealed wound, a life-altering event for its survivors. It is merely a playwright's device, a reason for creating a facile portrait of lives reshaped, all too artfully, by grief.--David Barbour 
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