This review has been reposted courtesy of the League of Cincinnati Theatres. For more LCT reviews click here to visit their reviews page.
What do you do when the world comes to an end?
This is the premise behind Diogenes Theatre Companies latest production, THE TRAMP’S NEW WORLD.
Rob Jansen as The Tramp.
This is a high quality performance, with a serious story involving being the last man standing after an atomic bomb explodes and kills everybody save for the lowly Tramp—the trademark character of silent screen legend Charlie Chaplin.
This story is based on a screenplay by James Agee, noted American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter (he wrote The African Queen), and film critic who died at the age of forty-five in 1955. Agee wanted Chaplin to star in the film, but Chaplin did not feel audiences would respond to the Tramp in the same way they did when he was in his heyday.
Chaplin has been proven wrong.
Rob Janson, who plays the Tramp, adapted the Agee screenplay to the stage. He does a marvelous job capturing the mixture of despair and anxiety that permeated the atomic age—and continues to permeate our own age.
While not trying to mimic Chaplin’s mannerisms, Jansen is an affecting mime who engages the audience – touching them, prompting applause, and even dancing with a patron.
Janson gives us a distilled version of the Tramp who tries to make a new life within the post-atomic wasteland. In the beginning of the play, Janson carts a bed across the theatrical space—a perfect symbol of tking the fragments of the old world to tell the story of the new.
This show had a tight lighting design by Sara Watson, with a strong sound & video Design by Doug Borntrager. Borntrager created some effective silent film clips which filled in some of the details of the story. Because the clips were being shown again a brown tarp, it took a little bit of effort to figure out what was written on some of the word cards.
Kudos to director Joseph Megal and stage manager Laura Karavitis, who kept the action and the technical crew in order.
At one hour in length, this was a play could have easily been part of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival. Yet it stands by itself as an outstanding example of what can be done with a solo actor and a great idea.
THE TRAMP’S NEW WORLD is running at the Fifth-Third Theater at the Aronoff Center for the Arts June 3-7 and June 10-13 with shows starting at 7:30 pm, save for 2 pm Sunday matinee on June 7th.
For more information on the production, click here.
Behind the Curtain Cincinnati 