Constructivists' "I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard" is a Devastating Character Study
By Gwendolyn Rice, Critic & Playwright
“Go see The Constructivists’ “I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard,” in Milwaukee — it’s a real tour de force for both actors!”
This spring Milwaukee theaters have been looking inward to find comedy, drama, and extreme dysfunction. In March, Skylight Music Theatre presented Noises Off – a meta-intense examination of the perils of regional touring productions, focusing on a group of overly dramatic actors rehearsing and performing a play. Now the Constructivists have opened I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, by Halley Feiffer. It’s a meta-cubed two-hander focusing on a young actor (Rebekah Farr) and her famous playwright father (James Pickering) who are waiting anxiously for a review to be published of her performance in The Seagull, a Chekhov play about an author and his leading lady receiving bad reviews after performing a new play.
And for one more layer of meta-ness, the semi-autobiographical piece I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard was written by an actress and playwright who happens to have a famous playwright for a father.
And for a final, exhausting layer of meta-tasticness, there were several critics on hand in the audience on opening night, laughing uncomfortably during the first scene, where the characters curse the small minds, broken ambitions, and miserable, sick, petty lives of theater critics, whose opinions, they assert, are generally worthless.
Once you get past the hall of mirrors that frames the play, I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard is actually an intense character study that is, by turns, heart wrenching, gut punching and horrifying.
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