Convergence-Continuum Opens Play About an “Ominously Comic Journey”

Fri 6/2-Sat 6/24 @ 8PM

Prolific Los Angeles playwright Tom Jacobson has written nearly three dozen plays, and two of those have been performed by Cleveland’s adventurous Convergence-Continuum theater in Tremont: Ouroboros in 2008 and The Twentieth-Century Way in 2021. They’ll about to add a third to that list when they open Walking to Buchenwald this week at their home at the little Liminis Theatre (never more than 50 capacity).

The synopsis tells us that “A soon-to-be-married couple, Schiller and Arjay, take Schiller’s parents on their first trip to Europe. Using his personal experience as a jumping-off point, playwright Tom Jacobson takes the audience on an ominously comic journey during which guinea pigs play cricket, dead bodies talk, and the two couples learn what it means to be American in a world that no longer admires the U.S.”

Sounds like a perfect fit for c-c which favors experimental plays with absurdist elements about complicated relationships that aren’t quite what they seem.

As critic Samuel Garza Bernstein of Stage and Cinema said, “[Walking to Buchenwald] takes a wide, nonjudgmental look at what it means to be a parent, a spouse, a child; what it feels like to be in a relationship with a partner who is your temperamental opposite; to be a liberal in a Red State; an American in a Trump-like western world; someone dying in a world obsessed with hollow positivity; and what it means to be a European shackled to an America teeming with reemerging nativism. Jacobson doesn’t seek to determine who is to blame for anything. None of us is to blame. All of us are to blame. Blame God. Whatever. This is our world. The way we live now, and the way we die.”

The play opens on Friday June 2 and runs through Saturday June 24, Thursdays-Saturdays @ 8PM. Get tickets and information at convergence-continuum.org.

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