"Clocks, like live animals, are dangerous things to put onstage, because they so easily draw your eye away from the performers. In Jacob Perkins's The Dinosaurs, for instance, I caught myself glancing up at the circular plastic one at the left of the stage, frozen at about 15 minutes past the hour. The immobile hands are surely a design choice, one that layers a sense of unreality over the otherwise hyperreal rec room (designed by the nearly ubiquitous firm dots) where The Dinosaurs's characters gather."
"With its archaeological title, Perkins's carved-ivory play is obsessed with the ways that time passes, stalls, and bends back on itself, even in the midst of quotidian tasks. It tracks the minutes - in a Robert's Rules of Order sense - of a meeting of women alcoholics, a discrete hour-long stretch that, if you happen to be checking that clock, seems to cover infinity and no time at all."
The production centers on an hour-long topic meeting of women alcoholics in a hyperreal rec room where an immobile wall clock frozen at fifteen past the hour casts a sense of unreality and warped time. Joan, an uptight PTA-type, organizes the meeting with three-minute meditations and short shares, arriving early with boxes of coffee and commanding Jane to fetch folding chairs. Joan's officiousness borders on unease through Elizabeth Marvel's performance, suggesting simmering tension. Other attendees include the deferential Jane, the anxious Joane who gossips about school, and a hauntingly spacey presence played by Kathleen Chalfant.
Read at Vulture
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