The Monsters
Life is Beautiful meets A Star is Born — with a heart! That may sound like a glib summation, but it’s not supposed to be. Rather, it’s a testament to daring and skill with which the play juxtaposes brutality and tenderness, heartbreak and triumph. UCSD School of Fine Arts alum Ngozi Anyanwu wrote and co-stars in the story of Big and Lil, half-siblings who reunite after a 16-year separation. He’s a fighter who got sober in order to avoid turning into his father; she’s drinking through her shifts at Applebee’s after the death of her mother. The story slips back and forth between how they got to this point and where they go from here, which means Anyanwu and co-star Sullivan Jones must slip back and forth from children to adults and from wrecked to excellent (and various stages in between). The deceptive ease with which they do so is a testament to both their acting and Anyanwu’s writing. (Props like juice boxes help, but what sells it is the physicality, the shift in carriage and movement that comes when the grown-ups suddenly start playing children.) The laughs are welcome and unforced and not so frequent as to distract from the hurtling energy of the story. Fun exchange: “I might be little, but I’m not letting you make me small!” “How long did you practice that?” “A week.” “You sold it a little hard.” The play itself has one or two hard-sell moments — Big’s big speech is an awfully polished cri de coeur, and the poem Lil has saved since childhood lands funny. But the sentiments are earned, and the meaning rings true. And if it feels fondly fantastical to imagine that such softness could endure beneath such tough exteriors, maybe it helps to remember that monsters aren’t real.