Someone's Review

We got a good review. So if you're in Iowa City this weekend, check it out. The critic liked it.

‘Someone’ will enrage, entertain
by Ruby Nancy, Quad City Times

Dreamwell Theatre’s revival of “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me,” by Frank McGuinness, is a dark and sometimes funny drama that showcases the quality of work it is possible to get from fine actors who get the chance to work with really great material.

The story of three hostages chained to a wall in Beirut, the action in this play is set back in a time when simply taking away a person’s everyday clothes and chaining them in perpetual isolation was considered cruel torture.

Director Gerry Roe and the cast of three from the original Dreamwell production in 1998 return to produce this fine work.

The performances are stunning in their simplicity — full of raw emotion and of struggles we can barely see. The characters bring their individual personalities and different ethnocentricities to their time of imprisonment, and their perspectives are at the heart of some of the most painful (and of the most hilarious) clashes that occur between these forced companions.

Thomas Williams is Adam, a compulsive American doctor who misses his parents and his jockey shorts. Williams does very nice work in this uptight, intensely personal role. His singing is one of the very rare moments in this show any music is heard, and the purity of his vocal work is ethereal.

Matthew Falduto is Edward, the feisty young Irish journalist whose love for his wife and children are matched in intensity only by his love for his country.

As Michael, a British professor, Matthew Brewbaker turns in a hauntingly fragile performance that is as uncomfortable as it is memorable.

The presentation is without intermission, and the lack of music between scenes are two devices that add to the spare intensity of this show, and there are many surprises and surprising hilarity to be found.

“Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” is a first-rate, if difficult to watch, production. Long on genuinly crafted acting and very short on distracting “stuff,” this is a play that will enrage, entertain, enlighten and evoke strong emotion of all kinds. Not to be taken lightly or forgotten easily, it is also not to be missed.