ALBANY \u2014 Strong work from the actors, designers and director cannot fully redeem a script that is at times tedious and\/or exasperating in \u201cDodi & Diana,\u201d a play that\u2019s neither as sexy nor provocative as author Kareem Fahmy seems to intend. Capital Repertory Theatre\u2019s production opened Tuesday and runs through May 17.<\/p>\n
The premise has promise: After about 10 years together, a married couple, Jason (Shaun Anthony) and Samira (Jessica Damouni), spend 72 hours alone in a Paris hotel room on the advice of Jason\u2019s astrologer, who believes them to be \u201cthe astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed.\u201d Their visit, with strict rules against phone or TV use or even opening the curtains, coincides with the 25th anniversary of the death of the celebrity couple, who fled the same hotel, owned by Fayed\u2019s father, and died in a car accident while pursued by paparazzi. Jason and Samira must stay in the room, he tells her, until the cosmic convergence of the exact time of the crash and when, as Jason puts it, \u201cJupiter completes its transit into our 12th house and we arrive at the threshold.\u201d<\/p>\n
The astrologer\u2019s assurance aside, the similarities between the two couples seem superficial. Dodi and Di had dated for a little more than a month before they died; Jason and Samira\u2019s history stretches over a decade. Diana, as the ex-wife of then-Prince Charles, was one of the most famous women in the world, and\u00a0Dodi\u2019s father was a billionaire international businessman; Jason is a successful finance guy, able to afford a multimillion-dollar Manhattan townhouse, and Samira\u2019s acting career has burgeoned to the point that she\u2019s competing for major screen parts, but both remain minor players in comparison to their alleged cosmological twins.<\/p>\n
Further, while both couples dealt with degrees of celebrity and racism, their respective relationships feel utterly dissimilar. In the 29 years since that fatal accident in the Pont de l\u2019Alma tunnel in Paris, Dodi and Diana have become iconically tragic, seemingly doomed from the start to be hounded to death. Surely Fahmy isn\u2019t suggesting they could have become Jason and Samira, privileged people whingeing about their relationship during a New Age quest.\u00a0When not squabbling or spewing\u00a0hurtfulness, they can\u2019t keep their hands off one another, often entwined on the vast hotel bed, lips locked and clothing coming off.<\/p>\n
As directed by Michael John\u00a0Garces and brought to life by Anthony and Damouni, the Jason-Samira connection has genuine heat at moments, but there are too few of them. The script nods toward frankness in sexual matters, then shies from them; Fahmy broaches domination and submission, with Samira asking to be choked, but short-circuits nuanced examination by having Jason compare the moment to \u201chardcore pornography.\u201d<\/p>\n
Significant theatrical talent went into creating The Rep\u2019s \u201cDodi & Diana.\u201d Skilled professionalism is obvious throughout, from Garces\u2019 pacing and stage pictures and the engaging acting to Misha Kachman\u2019s set, lighting and projections by Tom Ontiveros and the important work of Crista Marie Jackson as the intimacy coordinator and fight choreographer. But to what end, really, when the central relationship doesn\u2019t seem worthy of the conceit mapping them onto far more interesting real-life counterparts?<\/p>\n
Miriam Weisfeld, in her first season as producing artistic director of The Rep, said in her curtain speech at Tuesday\u2019s opening that choosing \u201cDodi & Diana\u201d was a way of continuing the theater\u2019s relationship with Fahmy, whose work has twice been featured in The Rep\u2019s Next Act! festival of new plays. Maybe it\u2019s time for an amicable breakup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALBANY \u2014 Strong work from the actors, designers and director cannot fully redeem a script that is at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[30394,157,844,610,9,11,10,49,51,50,12294,905],"class_list":["post-218016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-alco","tag-entertainment","tag-latestnews","tag-local","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-review","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}