New York playwright Joe Hortua’s 2004 play ‘Between Us’ explores familiar dramatic territory, charting the story of people who see the dreams and vitality of their youth come up against the tough realities of adult life and responsibility.
As fellow photographic students at college, Joel and Carlo were best friends with lofty dreams for their future. They spent a lot of time hanging out together with their respective girlfriends, Sharyl and Grace. Time has marched on, and the guys have married their gals. Joel has a lucrative career in advertising whilst Carlo looks set to get his big break, being featured in an important New York photographic exhibition. Joel and Sharyl have recently had their first child.
The play kicks off with a dinner party that Joel and Sharyl have organized for Carlo and Grace. The dinner reveals that the carefree days of college are well and truly a thing of the past, and Joel and Sharyl constantly argue. Sharyl flippantly tells Carlo and Grace, ‘we’re getting a divorce. Let’s have dessert’. In another memorable aside, Sharyl says, ‘God I hate dinner parties! Always, all this emotional baggage comes to the surface’.
At one point, the couple tell Carlo and Grace that they were going to make a sculpture of them to put in their garden,
depicting the perfect, happy couple. By the play’s end the audience knows that their idealisation of their friends marriage is far from the truth.
Jennifer Don’s sensitive production serves Hortua’s poignant drama well. The play’s central theme, exposing the different personalities that even close friends and intimates have, comes across well.
Don wins good performances from a great young cast. Damien de Montemas gives an intense performance as the passionate, brooding Joel with Caroline Craig impressing as his volatile but protective wife, Sharyl.
Ben Mortley plays the good natured but a bit inflexible Carlo, and Katherine Cullen is his straight-shooting, forthright wife, Grace.
The first half of the play simmers along but after interval, some time later, when Joel and Sharyl make an impromptu visit to Carlo and Grace’s home, the action boils over, and the cast powerfully bring the play home.
Colin Mitchell’s detailed set is a highlight. He, in effect, has to design two sets for Hortua’s play- before interval, we are in the spacious, ultra-modern living room of Joel and Sharyl, after interval we are in Grace and Carlo’s cluttered New York apartment.
Recommended, Jennifer Don’s production of Joe Hortua’s ‘Between Us’ plays the Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDoougall Street, Kirribilli until Saturday, 4th September, 2010.
