Good Grief, Sidney--A Solid Effort All 'Round

The premise of Good Grief, Sidney is simple: Walter's wife has died and in order to come to terms with his grief he has written a play. The antagonist in the play is Sidney, Walter's atavistic other self. Walter feels he owes it to himself and to his wife to remain the aggrieved widower; Sidney however, wants to get laid. He's not so much an alter-ego as an alter-id.

The actor playing Walter was nervous and awkward, two attributes that I would not normally praise, but for Walter I thought they worked. His halting delivery and his failure to make strong eye contact conveyed a sense of authenticity that drew me in from the first line. I felt that I was listening to the words of the writer himself. He seemed like a man awkwardly bearing his soul.

In my opinion Sidney should drop the attempts to recreate a New York accent for two reasons. The actor's struggles with the accent made it hard at times to understand what he was saying. And from a writerly point of view, the sexist=New Yorker thing was always better done by Andrew Dice Clay and Rodney Dangerfield--two caricatures on which the caricature of Sidney were almost certainly based. As a poorly understood part of Walter's psyche, Sidney is supposed to be somewhat of a caricature but unless Walter has a history in the Big Apple--and we have no reason to suspect that he does--it seems unlikely that a part of him is a sexist New Yorker. It rings false.

With this minor workshopping out of the way, I feel I can endorse Sidney to future visitors of the Fringe. It was the most heartfelt and honest thing I've seen at the Fringe so far and the most unsettlingly raw (in a good way) play I've seen in a while.