Heaven Scent

Tony Abatemarco�s uptight little island

A A A Comments (0) By Steven Mikulan Wednesday, Apr 26 2000

Perhaps more assertive -- and intrusive -- than the set is Julie Ferrin‘s sound design, a freebase of song snatches and koto riffs. While they hardly form an American Graffiti soundtrack, and we only get brief cuts of them, the pop tunes are the kind one always hears in theater and film whenever the ’60s need to be conjured (the Troggs‘ ”Wild Thing,“ Jimi Hendrix’s version of Bob Dylan‘s ”All Along the Watchtower,“ etc.). And, considering that these and other references, both musical and not, consistently anticipate the story’s time line by a year or two (Raquel Welch posters in 1965? Donna Summer‘s ”I Feel Love“ setting the scene for Boston, 1969? I don’t think so), you have to wonder if we need such signposts at all. Perhaps more annoying is the use of a concierge bell to signal epiphanies -- a Pavlovian ploy Schweizer used in Sandra Tsing Loh‘s Aliens in America and which seems to be cropping up in other directors’ work (Metamorphoses, anyone?), suggesting that it is time to retire this gimmick unless a scene requires the appearance of a bellhop.

But these reservations are really quibbles, as the Abatemarco-Schweizer collaboration is definitely a rewarding one. Schweizer is always at his best when finding and bringing out the dramatic potential of a soloist‘s tale, while calming the more overheated moments that might seem to require shouting. Abatemarco’s narrative, the smartest evocation of a time and a place since John O‘Keefe’s Shimmer, is a fable that transforms a suburban back yard into a Garden of Olives and a Suffolk County hick town into a Washington Irving village that has been forgotten by time but not by its exiled son.