Glibness Mars ‘Breaking the Story,’ Alexis Scheer’s Latest, but at Least There Are a Few Good Punchlines
As with ‘Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,’ which earned acclaim several years ago, women are the dominant figures in ‘Story,’ but in this case they tend to evoke generational clichés.
Alexis Scheer’s new play, “Breaking the Story,” begins with a bang, literally, and features several more before its roughly 80 minutes have expired. The central character, Marina, is a veteran foreign correspondent who clearly suffers from PTSD. We meet her in an unnamed war zone as she tries to report between missile strikes; yet the explosions continue intermittently, as flashbacks, even after she has moved to more peaceful surroundings — a house with a garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts — to ponder early retirement.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of figurative whimpering between the blasts. Ms. Scheer earned acclaim several years ago with “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” another play that carries into an idyllic suburban setting ghosts of terror from abroad; in that work, a group of seemingly privileged teenage girls gathers in a treehouse to summon the ghost of a notorious Colombian cartel leader, Pablo Escobar.
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