There’s a scene part of the way through The Late Utopians when Emma (Lilly Walker) visits her mother, who is also played by Walker in this solo show. She tells her mother that she should come visit her in New York and see where she gets her coffee and does her laundry. Her mother is incredulous: “she wants me to see where she washes her clothes?”
That’s a bit how it feels to watch this amorphous play, written and directed by Alfie Jones. Walker plays a high-minded young journalist who sets out to write a magazine article about rave culture in New York City (which seems centred around a single club, called Dust). We don’t get much about her journey through this underworld, or, really, any other sort of character arc, because she appears to believe that presenting us with the laundry of her quotidian observations is enough.
The story launches with Emma’s acceptance of her assignment, and that’s a perfectly intriguing premise. However, this promising start is quickly abandoned, and we pivot instead to the story of her relationship with Mark, a man entrenched in her new scene. Mark is such a sparsely sketched character that it’s difficult to care much about the outcome of their relationship.
This is especially true as Emma herself is only nominally drawn. All we really know is that she’s an ambitious and somewhat self-involved young writer who likes to dance and sometimes take drugs.
Walker’s portrayal of Emma is convincing, but she’s less sure-footed in giving voice to the many other characters in this piece. Some, like the mother, or an acquaintance in the club who relates, for some reason, her dream of being buried by Elton John’s cousin’s friend, appear only briefly. Others, like Mark, are crucial to the story. All the secondary characters are presented with an equally tepid intensity, and never really lift off the page.
Walker’s Emma is given to making ostensibly weighty, Gatsby-esque pronouncements that, on second look, are just dressed-up platitudes. She offers many specific details in her anecdotes, such as about her nephew simulating sex acts with toy dinosaurs, or, later, about an ICE protest, but these are offhand, immediately dropped, and don’t seem to correlate with what should be expansions on key plot points. There’s a major development thrown in at the end that’s unmotivated by anything that comes before it and seems to be there just to supply an ending.
When they aren’t bombastic or painfully self-conscious, the individual lines of The Late Utopians are fine. They simply don’t cohere into any kind of drama. No throughline is apparent, and, because of that, there’s no tension or momentum. The overall effect is more of a staged reading of a blog, and, while that’s not an entirely unreasonable premise for a Fringe show either, it doesn’t seem to be what was intended here.
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