Through March 26
THE THIN PLACE Road Less Traveled Theatre/RLTProductions
By Augustine Warner
For some, they live in a world in which there is a thin barrier between this world and the next.
We have an outpost of this view in the Southern Tier in Lily Dale.
If you believe in this thin barrier, it opens the minds of believers to contact with that other side.
Do you believe?
That’s what Lucas Hnath’s wonderful “The Thin Place” is about, looking through that thin barrier.
Hilda (Renee Landrigan) has lost her family and develops a close friendship with Linda (Margaret Massman), who can communicate through the barrier.
She argues more can do that but think they are just hearing voices.
Hilda also talks about the vicious and tangled relationship she had with her mother and grandmother (who she misses).
Hilda sees Linda carrying on conversations with the dead and is more than a little confused, uncertain those messages are really occurring.
That’s as relatives say what questions should be asked, placing credibility in the answers relayed through the seeming medium.
It all falls apart when Sylvia (Kristen Tripp Kelley) and Jerry (David Mitchell) arrive one day.
Both see Linda as a tool for their own purposes, while being very skeptical about the actuality of what she is doing, or, says she is doing.
Linda likes the lifestyle all of this brings to her and is faced with Sylvia and Jerry’s machinations and skepticism.
She pushes Hilda away before she can probe whether Linda is breaking the barrier.
For a relatively short play, “The Thin Place” is fascinating, staged on what is truly a spare set from Dyan Burlingame.
Director Scott Behrend and assistant Hasheen DeBerry do well with this look into another world, aided by Katie Menke’s sound design and John Rickus’ lighting.
All of them benefit from a strong cast highlighted by Landrigan and by Massman.
Whether you believe in that permeable wall or you don’t, you can believe in the value of seeing “The Thin Place.”
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