Changes to Face the Strain

Beginning with “Creep” by “Radiohead,” “With a Shrug,” a play debuting on the first annual Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival, takes the audience on a journey from a casual meeting between a teenager searching his deceased friend’s house for something that belongs to him and a woman with a baseball bat, who takes the kid for a thief, to a conclusion that simple-heartedness is not always a virtue and may be life-threatening. Remembering the past and learning things from each other about the man who is now dead, the characters, Shelly (Gina Bonati) and Chris (David Holmes) keep the audience in suspense throughout the whole time.

And at the end, the viewers are on their own trying to figure out if the conflict is resolved or not. This doesn’t make the play, unfinished, though, but it leaves space for contradictory opinions, thanks to the playwright, Nicholas Priore, and director, Robert Haufrecht, who put their characters in an uneasy situation.

An aspiring but misunderstood writer (as she notes, “All it takes to be a writer is to write”), Shelly shows up on the stage wearing classic blue jeans and a stained green T-shirt. She looks like a woman who just wants to get it over with while cleaning her father’s apartment for the last time. Even though Shelly didn’t see the old man for a while, she grieves for him, and being there is difficult for her.

When Shelly discovers that a strange teenager, Chris, is looking through her garbage bags, she gets angry. But her face quickly softens, as she sees that he is a young man and he says that he was a friend of her father’s. “I wasn’t a stranger,” Chris explains his relationship with the deceased. “We ate soup.”

Just as weird as his logic is, the teenager is shy, with his fingers in his mouth. He confesses that his father believes he is socially awkward (it appears to be true, no matter how cruel the statement is), and he is a bit uncomfortable when talking to Shelly. The woman is coquettish with him. She even starts liking this boy in bordo pants and old sneakers, with disobedient mess of curls on his head. But only until she finds out what exactly her father borrowed from the kid.

This is when the conflict starts.

“I thought he was your friend,” cries Shelly. “He was,” Chris agrees. “Otherwise, why would I lend him something so valuable?”

Again, the boy’s artlessness fails him in this social setting, as the audience questions, “Is friendship giving the person everything he or she asks for or is it being protective and shielding a friend from harm?” Chris believes in the former, while Shelly goes for the latter. As the teenager has no clue that sometimes words should not be taken literally, the viewers hesitate to judge him as a bad person or to sympathize with him.

And finally, there is another thing to ponder about: the name of the play. Was it Chris who let his “friend” die with a shrug, or was it Shelly who shrugged at the young man realizing that she can’t change him? Maybe, all of us live with a shrug not willing to take on responsibilities that freak us out, turning into indifferent creeps incapable of helping each other.