Studio Theatre’s Octet Has Eight Voices and No Story Arc
Dave Malloy’s a cappella chamber musical delivers striking harmonies but never develops into an engaging drama.
On a rainy night inside a nondescript church basement, eight strangers gather in a support group for addicts struggling with digital dependency. Actually, at the outset of Octet, Dave Malloy’s a cappella chamber musical presented in the round at Studio Theatre, seven in the group have already arrived, each stowing away their cell phone. But one of the eight chairs sits empty.
The eighth in this eclectic octet, a young woman, Velma (Amelia Aguilar), enters slightly late, seemingly unsure about her place here, or whether she’s prepared to add her voice to the chorus of confessions. Whatever her reservations, she is not initially one with the group. Will that change over the course of these 100 minutes? We have a hunch.
Also, this is a musical, so we can certainly gauge that the young lady most timidly guarding her voice will turn out to sing like an angel. Indeed, Aguilar adds a lovely tone to the group’s resonant harmonies as they go around the circle, and, one by one, occasionally as a chorus, lament how their addiction to posting, scrolling, gaming, chatting, or other digital pastimes is disrupting, or even destroying, their life.
For the production’s D.C. premiere, director David Muse has assembled a cast of compelling vocalists, including one of our favorite D.C. theater performers, Tracy Lynn Olivera, as Paula, the group’s facilitator.
Paula reveals she’s not living with her dependency alone. “My husband is an addict, too,” she confesses, before singing poignantly of how she and her husband lie in bed together, breathing in, breathing out, their “circadian rhythms corrupted by the sallow blue glow of a screen sucking our souls and melatonin.”
Olivera makes digging into Paula’s distress look effortless, while taking us through the story of her song. Responsible for the music, lyrics, book, and vocal arrangements, Malloy (Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) frequently finds just the right pungent phrasing to describe these conditions familiar to us all in the digital age.
“Refresh, refresh, refresh,” sings social media junkie Jessica (Chelsea Williams). Been there. She was “canceled,” she says, after a video of her going ballistic in public went viral online. Alright, maybe that’s just her. “All the games I like have candy in them,” sings chipper Henry (Angelo Harrington II). And that sounds like maybe a dozen people you know.
Within the broad scope of digital dependency, Malloy picks out and examines very specific fixations to reflect a universal pain, an aching disconnection that touches everybody through their devices.
Some songs in Malloy’s score of gentle hymns, ballads, and chorals convey their facets of the whole more clearly, as do some of the performances. Others are less clear. David Toshiro Crane’s overacted take on Marvin the neurochemist, for example, renders him more a collection of character descriptors than a man with deep truth to share.
They all get their turn to hold the floor and state their case, as it were, and Muse keeps the cast moving more or less naturally through the rituals of support-group discussions. Textually, there’s little significant connective tissue between one person’s blues and another’s. The characters don’t engage in much processing or action between turns that would evolve these relationships.
While the songs individually are dynamic, the cycle doesn’t build but just progresses from one to the next, to the next. As my theater companion observed, it feels “like Cats,” and not in a good way. Cats at least builds to a payoff for its procession of “Hi, I’m Bumblebritches, and here’s what I’ve been through to get here” numbers. Octet offers no such satisfaction, and, ultimately, too little drama to chew on, while it scrolls from story to story.
Octet (★★1/2☆☆☆) runs through March 8 at the Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW Tickets are $55 to $102, with discount options available. Call 202-332-3300 or visit StudioTheatre.org.
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