Young love, in hindsight

By Peter Filichia for The Star-Ledger | January 26, 2012

Chance encounter in ‘Shooting Star’ offers a fleeting moment to recapture youth

You’ve thought about it, dreamed about it, yearned for it—and dreaded it:

What would happen if you ran into the person with whom you had your first real romantic relationship, lo those many years ago?

“Thought-provoking drama”

Fate answers that question for Reed McAllister and Elena Carson in “Shooting Star.” It’s Steven Dietz’s thought-provoking drama, now at Dreamcatcher Repertory Theatre in South Orange. That director David Christopher has delivered an honest production with two fine performances makes it a nice addition to the winter theater season.

Reed and Elena spot each other at the airport. He’s on a business trip to Austin, she on a pleasure trip to Boston. Coincidentally, each lives in the city the other is headed toward.

That’s about all they have in common these days. Although they once were both cohabitating hippies—down to the milk-crate coffee table in their living room and the macramé on their walls—Reed’s since gone corporate. Elena’s held onto most of her ideals. In fact, one motivation for her going to Boston is that “I promised my friend I’d help her with her cleansing ceremony.”

With “snowflakes the size of doilies” preventing each of them from flying out, they’re relegated to talking to each other.

Of course, either one could easily get away with an excuse. But part of Dietz’s point here is that this happenstance meeting carries with it the dynamics of a car accident. You can’t look at it—and you can’t look away.

Laura Ekstrand and Harry Patrick Christian play former lovers in Shooting Star

What’s more, the attraction may still be there, however dormant it’s been for the past 26 years. The question is whether the two of them are more interested in recapturing their youth and less focused on finding out what’s changed, for each of them, over the years.

Reed, now a husband and father, does ask, “Why didn’t you get married?” Answers Elena: “I got too interesting.”

Needless to say, the two take time to make recriminations. During their 22 months together, Reed and Elena had agreed that seeing other people would be allowed. One, however, wanted this arrangement far more than the other. The memory of that open relationship reopens some wounds.

Laura Ekstrand superbly achieves the mixture of a hippie who has finally come to terms with the real world. The expression on her face and the timbre in her voice when she tells of slaving as a telemarketer is palpable. “I work in a cubicle the size of a coffin,” she admits. “I make the phone call that nobody wants.”

Harry Patrick Christian has fine-tuned his performance to let us slowly but certainly see that Reed is not quite the mover, shaker and global force that he expected to be. There’s a good deal of world-weariness in this character, and not merely because he’s stuck at an airport.

The two do convince that they were once a couple. They come out with almost the same-sized slight smiles as each recalls that Joni Mitchell ballad, that Neil Young song. Both are surprised to find that they still remember names and events that they would have expected to have faded long ago.

And while no one keeps track of such matters, “Shooting Star” may well be the first time in a play that a character directly addresses the audience—until he hears a beeping sound. “Sorry,” Reed mutters. “I have to take this call.” And offstage he goes to do just that.

Luckily for the audience, he does return.

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