Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Zach (Craig Wesley Divino), apparently living with a mysterious fatal illness, majored in medieval history at college and now writes and consults for medieval-oriented entertainments like the television series Round Table. That one deals with King Arthur of the sword Excalibur, and is a boob-tube success possibly resembling something along the Game of Thrones lines. Zach also spends spare time indulging in live-action role-play, known familiarly here by the acronym LARP.
Laura (Liba Vaynberg), whom he meets on a blind date and with whom he begins an affair that’s doomed perhaps by Zach’s terminal prognosis, is a writer, too. She’s a would-be novelist earning her living by penning romance novels under the pseudonym Pamela Wolfstein.
Zach and Laura are the focal figures in actor-playwright Vaynberg’s Round Table, the program title for which has the former word in an old(e) typeface and the latter word in a modern typeface, thereby indicating that the ancient period and the contemporary one will both show up during the work’s intermissionless 90 minutes.
The Zach-Laura up-and-down-in-and-out romantic interludes develop apace, often also peopled by Zach’s brother Kay (Karl Gregory), an EMT worker, and associates Lena (Sharina Martin), a bartender, and Jeff (Matthew Bovee), a tax attorney. At times the latter two portray, respectively, mythic King Arthur figures Morgan (more familiarly known as Morgan le Fay) and Mordred, whose sword is dubbed Clarent and who is sometimes assumed to be Arthur’s villainous nephew. Kay doesn’t show up way back then, though he bears the name of King Arthur’s foster brother.
Significantly, Morgan and Mordred materialize when, throughout Round Table, the focus shifts from the canoodling, sometimes contentious Zach and Laura to swashbuckling sequences where the Arthurian legend figures tangle. But wait. Some of the sequences depict tv-series-swashbuckling while others are not-so-swashbuckling. They’re halting versions of the King Arthur legend that, I think, are meant to be LARPing. That’s to say they’re live-action-role-playing sessions wherein Zach is working out the plots of the Round Table episodes he contributes.
If that’s not correct, I don’t know what is. I do know that Vaynberg is a promising playwright, who’s come up with an appealing, though too often confusing script—what with all the King Arthur scenes, scenes that might even be intended as comments on the mundanity of daily 2019 life in contrast to the truly adventurous lives we imagine were lived every day when knighthood was in flower.
Vaynberg’s depiction of Zach and Laura as two well-educated writers trying to find their way with each other, even as one of them is keeping a serious secret, is touching. She even reveals a poetic streak in the occasional monologues she gives the characters. And for further poetic flavor, she inserts excerpts from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Since Vaynberg is a writer, as is Laura, and since the first and last letters of her given name—Liba—are the same as the name she gives her leading female figure, it could be fair enough to suspect that Round Table is a semi-autobiographical piece. It may be that Vaynberg is fictionalizing a melancholy incident from her life. That could account for the comedy-drama’s strengths and weaknesses.
If Vaynberg is actually playing a variation on herself, she’s certainly good at it, especially in a LARP section where she’s attempting to keep up with characters already sufficiently skilled at live-action role-playing. There’s a good joke here, too, since acting itself is no more nor less than live-action role-playing. At it Vaynberg isn’t the only commendable LARPer. In the play’s vernacular, awesome is what the other four actors are, particularly Gregory as a brother who both loves his brother but is close to fed up with his brother’s foibles.
Up-and-coming director Geordie Broadwater keeps the cast members hopping at the right pace. Since no separate credit is given for sword-clashing direction, it must be that Broadwater is responsible as well for the assurance with which those sequences are executed. The 59E59 theater C is small, and I was seated in the front row, so close to the expert pull-no-parry-and-thrust punches that I was fearful either Excalibur or Clarent or both might swash my buckles at any second.
The spare Izmir Ickbal set, the Cha See lighting, the Fan Zhang sound and the Johanna Pan costumes all helped the atmospherics, with the Pan notions requiring special mention. The sixth-century wardrobe items are fine, and that definitely goes for a horned helmet Mordred wears. But it’s one 21st-century costume that takes the cake: pajama bottoms that King Arthur-obsessed Zach dons. Get this. Those bottoms are covered with cartoon stones that have swords—cartoon Excaliburs?—stuck in them. Where did Pan find this delightful addition? Cheers for her doing so.
Round Table opened October 6, 2019, at 59E59 Theatres and runs through October 20. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
