Alaska

‘Alaska’ was written by D.C. Moore in 2004. This 70-minute, Hook in Eye Production, in conjunction with the Blue Room, is an Australian First showing in The Blue Room Studio until the 27^th June. All shows at 6.30 pm, plus late shows on Friday and Saturdays at 9.15 pm (excluding 12^th and 13^th June).

           Confused loner, 24-year-old drug dealing, university student, Frank (Jeffrey Jay Fowler), is a social failure and has a massive chip on his shoulder. On quitting university, like Alaska his brain is devoid of any ‘life’ or common sense, so as a result he gets a dead-end job at a cinema. In an attempt to show his superiority at work, he spouts forth his views on race, backing his statements with quotes from the Bible. When offered promotion as kiosk manager, he turns it down, only to find that Mamta, a young ‘Paki’ woman (Trushna Mahisuri) takes the post instead. This new manager and male fellow worker Chris (Cody Fern) fancy Frank. Mamta is perplexed as why she does not get any response to her magnetism. Frank then tells his new boss exactly what he thinks of ‘brown skinned’ girls. This leads to troubles with her brother.
          When Mamta is forced to exert her managerial power, the balance swings. She starts by talking with sympathetic and sensitive Emma (Michelle Francis), Frank's one-nightstand, only to fire her on the spot.

         Frank’s racist logic is easy to understand, but the misguided mentality is obviously based on ignorance of the human race and the various environments.

This quality play was written when David Moore was part of a UK Young Writers’ Programme, his acclaimed talent being an ability to gain understanding and pity for this thoroughly dislikeable youth. Michelle Sowden’s direction of the play came across as a pleasant little story, with generally good acting, however partly due to the pace being too slow, the powerful speeches, frustration, inadequacies, prejudices, and prevailing anger were largely missing. At no time did I feel uncomfortable or pity. The cast are talented and what they produced was good, but please turn up the pace and aggro. Which I am sure they will in the next night or two.

The set (Monique Wajon) was constructed from palettes, which had been painted grey, thus giving more focus to the actors and the richly written script. The clever and subtle lighting (Chris Isaacs) was integrated into the pallets the whole effect worked well. Good crisp sound design by Adam Trainer, with background music of cymbals and white noise (?).

The highlight was a cameo appearance by Chris Isaacs as a druggie, where he captured the part beautifully. As Frank would have quoted – from Genesis 22 – was ‘Isaac offered up as a sacrifice to appease the Gods’ and the audience?