SARASOTA – Cleveland playwright Eric Coble's My Barking Dog emerged as a surprise hit on his home city's theater scene in 2011 and is continuing to enjoy success at regional theaters throughout the country. On Friday, it opened at Urbanite Theatre in downtown Sarasota.
The play is exactly what we've come to expect from an Urbanite production–smart, edgy, visceral and socially relevant. In one fast-paced, 85-minute act, Melinda and Toby, urban dwellers who live in the same apartment building, are moved into activism by their encounters with a wild coyote who regularly visits their building.
The play is blatant commentary on the consequences of continued human encroachment into and the urbanization of wild habitats, but also has a Kafkaesque twist that delves into man's own conflicts and anxiety with becoming overly-domesticated and too far removed from his natural state.
It's also funny as hell, something that few plays with a social message manage to be. Coble's command of language is impressive, but there's also some very, very good chemistry between Miles Duffield and Caitlin Hargraves. Toby has been laid off from his office management job and barely treading water in an overly streamlined world where demand for labor continues to fall. Melinda is a professional paper shredder of sorts who feels equally out of place in her worker drone life.
photo by Ryan Finzelber
Together, they awkwardly navigate something close to a relationship–both are ill-equipped socially–through their obsession with the coyote, whom they leave raw meat out for each evening. The animal's grace, well-defined purpose and clear lack of the anxiety that comes along with self-consciousness makes them long for a more primitive existence, closer to nature, pushing them into vigilante acts of rebellion.
Duffield is infectiously self-conscious and his sardonic inner monologues serve as the pace-setters in a somewhat manic piece that can go from staid silence to violent outburst and back at a roller-coaster's pace. Caitlin Hargraves delivers a frighteningly realistic portrayal of a person coming unhinged in what was without a doubt one of the more powerful performances I can recall in recent memory.
photo by Ryan Finzelber
Daniel Kelly, who was producing artistic director Michael Donald Edwards' assistant for two years at the Asolo Rep and helmed Urbanite's successful production of Lungs last season, directs. My Barking Dog makes for a thought-provoking, entertaining and overall satisfying evening of theater. It runs through Dec. 18. Visit the Urbanite website for ticket and schedule info.
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