Aronson and Park’s sweet rom-com of two washed-up “helperbots” with a slightly ambiguous twist at its conclusion features engaging leads and a listenable, if unchallenging, score. But the big winners in this production are the design team behind set, costumes, video, lights, and sound: Dane Laffrey, Clint Ramos, Ben Stanton, Peter Hylenski, and George Reeve. The clash of olive and pink on Claire and teal blue and earth tones on Oliver is quite tasty. Wagons silently smooch into place behind panels, drops, and scrims; dazzling projections recreate memories stored in the bots’ hard drives;1 and was that a hologram? The futuro-retro mail delivery chute is also a nice touch.
Granted, as the two bots set out on the journey that binds them together, the music picks up a crunchier tone, as in “The Rainy Day We Met.”
- Maybe Happy Ending, by Will Aronson and Hue Park, directed by Michael Arden, The National Theatre, Washington
1Hard drive? Perhaps this is a case of next-century semantic drift.