Honor the System
Out of Box Theatre
through November 20, 2016

This is the premiere of a new show created by actor-playwright Daniel Carter Brown.  He’s quite obviously a young rising star with a bright future.  The play was designed with this venue in mind, since the stage setting is just what he wanted for it, and it works quite well with the cast of five.

Imagine checking in to a hotel where there are no employees, and everything is on the honor system.  You pay as you go, clean up after yourself, and behave; or you will get punished.  How, why, and by whom any such punishment is delivered is what the tale is about; and it does draw the audience in from the first minute.

Marigold (Karen Ruetz) is a woman staying at the hotel who seems to be into various abstract theories.   Wayne (Jeffrey Sneed) is a writer who is also staying at the hotel and is totally into himself.  He doesn’t need anyone else bothering him.  Zoe (Melissa Rainey) shows up thinking it may be a normal stop along the road in Iowa, only to find that she is in some kind of weird place.

But, things get a lot weirder when Ryan (Matthew Busch) and his sister, Trish (Ali Olahausen) show up.  Stress starts to run everyone’s life, and things continue to erupt into scenes.  Yes, there are plenty of expletives and yelling; but nothing you’ve not heard and seen before.

Carolyn Choe directed this work, and if comes off just fine.  You sit there trying to figure out where things are going, but you will be wrong.  I do understand that when writing a story it is always a lot easier to start a plot then to wind it up at the end.  And, it could be that the final scene of this one could use a little tweaking.  However, you will see that all does come more or less right, in the end.

This is a really funny one, and you can get more info at OutOfBoxTheatre.com