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REVIEW: "Shooting Star" by Heller Theatre
Published: 5/18/2012 1:24 PM
Last Modified: 5/20/2012 5:01 PM

The modern-day equivalent of “ships passing in the night” might well be “old flames meeting in an airport.”
At least, that’s the case with the characters in Steven Dietz’s bittersweet play “Shooting Star,” which Heller Theatre is staging this weekend.
It’s been a good 25 years since Reid McAllister (Timothy Hunter) has seen Elena Carson (Lisa McCrossen-Porter), but back in the couple’s younger days, they saw a great deal of each other.
It was unavoidable — Reid and Elena lived together for two years during college, in a relationship that Elena insisted be “open.”
Now, they meet in an anonymous airport that has been shut down because of a winter storm. Reid is trying to get to a business meeting in Austin, in pursuit of a futile goal in a place he neither needs or wants to be. Elena is on her way to Boston, to meet a friend for what she calls a “cleansing ceremony.”
He’s in a suit and tie, with matching rolling luggage and Wall Street Journal. She’s in denim and tie-dyes, holding a rag-tag clutch of bags and a rain stick.
What starts out as a “Whatever happened to you?” conversation, with Elena pointing out all the ways Reid has sold out the ideals he espoused while in college, gradually turns into a “Where did we go wrong?” mix of dialogue and soliloquies, as Elena and Reid examine their shared yesterdays and separate todays.
It’s a quiet, simple play about the futility of trying to capture something that is long past, and one that lives or dies on how convincing its actors are at portraying all the complexity of being ordinary.
Hunter is spot-on as Reid, for whom this trip is merely a way station between the various crises of work and family that await him at any destination. He underplays each subtle change in Reid’s emotional state, so that you get a sense of how much the weight of time bears down on him.
The way Dietz has written the character of Elena makes one expert her to have more of an edge, more of a submerged sense of anger and intensity, than McCrossen-Porter brings to the character. Her Elena is a little too flighty, too theatrical at the start, but as the show progresses, McCrossen-Porter becomes a little more comfortable in Elena’s skin.
Director Julie Tattershall has trimmed the play to run just under an hour — it will be the company’s entry in the upcoming OCTAfest competition, where such brevity is a requirement. Yet the play feels complete — a leisurely paced vignette that tells you all you need to know about these two very ordinary people.
“Shooting Star” continues with performances at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Tuesday, and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Henthorne PAC, 4825 S. Quaker Ave. For tickets, call 918-746-5065.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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