MARY-ARRCHIE BLOG

IDENTITY DEFT Stark, left, sets Garcia up.

London playwright Kennedy’s 2006 work is about an in-over-his-head midlevel marketing exec named Charlie. It’s also about a cipher named Adam. Both are played with charming intensity by Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, who is not playing multiple characters. Or is he? That’s the question at the heart of Kennedy’s unsettlingly funny and provocative play.

“Charlie Hunt is nothing more than a collection of pieces of paper,” the slippery Mike (Kevin Stark, spot-on as an artful codger) tells Charlie, who’s gotten too deep into debt, drugs and embezzling. In the wake of his mother’s death, Charlie’s world has come crashing down, and a hunch has driven him out of desperation to Mike, a mysterious acquaintance who showed up at his mother’s funeral and becomes Charlie’s tutor in abandoning his old identity and adopting a new one as Adam.

William Anderson’s inventive, off-kilter set reflects Kennedy’s disorienting setup, in which Charlie finds cutting his ties with the world fairly easy logistically but perhaps too difficult psychologically. While the playwright’s first-act rants about the indignities of modern life are wholly relatable in Garcia’s hands, they also impede our sense of the play’s direction, and the device of a pathologist (Shannon Clausen) who keeps telling Charlie he’s already dead just confuses matters. But Kennedy’s points about the mutability of identity in the bureaucratic age will be turning over in our heads for quite a while.