Magic Berries, a new play written and directed by Valentin Ducept at the Etcetera Theatre, is a Hitchcock style psychological thriller with plenty of interesting twists and turns.
Three colleagues find themselves locked in an office on the hundredth floor of a New York skyscraper, they have been locked in deliberately and all means of communication severed, save for a cell phone that receives only incoming calls.
Each of those incoming calls reveals a little more about the man that’s holding them captive, between the calls the characters share some hidden secrets and their true motives for needing to escape their captivity.
The set is well laid out, meaning you always have a good view of what’s happening. It’s a little harder to understand everything that’s being said as some of the cast tend to mumble at key points. Overall though, Aaron Tavaler, Liliane Laborde-Edozien, Noelle Adames, and Valentin Ducept do a good job of bringing the script off the page.
You never feel like the characters are actually in any danger, and they don’t seem to believe it either, choosing instead to wax lyrical about all kinds of subjects. There’s a number of ways they could have escaped that locked office but make very little attempt to actually do so. In the end this robs the play of the tension that should be building, though intrigue is certainly heightened with each turn of events.
Magic Berries has a great deal of potential and could easily hold its own in the genre, if some plot and performance issues are tidied up.
