alt Lake Acting Company is really starting to impress me these days. Honest.

The Salt Lake Acting Company continued its recent run of witty and poignant plays as it previewed “Wait!,” a play by award-winning SLAC resident playwright Julie Jensen.

Kirstie Resenfield, who last directed “The Beard of Avon,” directed “Wait!” The play includes a cast of familiar SLAC faces like Brenda Sue Cowley, Erin Hiatt Morgan Lund and Annette Wright.

A SLAC press release defines the premise as, “Ms. Jensen’s unique look at a young woman’s life in a fictional small Western town and her adventures in a rag-tag community theater filled with unforgettably colorful characters.”

Oh, and it is. Cowly takes an impressive turn in her starring role as Wendy, a misunderstood closet homosexual daughter of a drunk, boisterous and existentially aware (and duly depressed) father, played by Lund. The cast brings a witty and clever script to life and the schizophrenic (on first glance) multi-character portrayals are well-suited to the amalgam of topics and set designs born unto “Wait!”

The story is slow to develop and at first it seems as though the playwright attempts—unsuccessfully—to chronicle the depraved lives of a small hypothetical town, but forgets to give us any reason to care about them.

Ten minutes into the first act, that assumption is put to rest.

Cowly incorporates the audience into her every notion and allows those in the rows privy access to her deeper and darker longings…you begin to understand—after she echoes her feelings over and over—why Wendy is as unfortunate as she is.

The comedy in “Wait!” is superb and the subcharacters are a welcome escape—at very necessary intervals—to the underlying depression and bleakness attached to the main characters’ lives. The Greek characters, played by Lund and Wright, are hilarious and Jensen is successful where so many other authors are not: She makes an offensive stereotype truly comical.

While the April 9 viewing was a preview and it was obvious that the cast was getting used to each other and rounding out some rough edges, the subversive brilliance (and, yes, I do use the term sparingly) is apparent. As it grapples with intangible and never-explicit homosexual undertones, “Wait!” manages to trick the audience into believing it to be a comedy until, like an unlicensed semi-truck, Jensen hits the audience with unexpected but bold truths about life itself. The integral moments before and after life-altering actions take place—when a person can only (gasp!) wait—are the focus of nearly every scene.

Alcoholic memories play out in Wendy’s father’s head as he breaks down and the audience breaks down along side him. When a full house can go from rolling laughter to pin-dropping silence in the time it takes to deliver one devastating line, it’s clear that a play has utility…tears of pain in the rows were, I’m sure, pawned off sheepishly as tears of laughter on numerous occasions.

Beneath the comic overtones, “Wait!” is a moving play about self-discovery and struggle. Its personality derives from its life mimicking truisms, the final of which is the fact that, much like a play, life goals often burn out and the darkness left in their wake is sometimes more welcome than the light because it can’t pass judgement on your failures.
eryn@red-mag.com