Joseph MervisMr. ShewellRepertory Theatre3 March 2015

One Acts CritiqueAshleigh Baker

In the 2015 Winter One Acts at North Central High School, the stand-out should have been The Girl in the Mirror by Bruce Jacoby, however the show failed to develop any empathy for the lead character, Susan Connors, thus losing the audience. Junior Ashleigh Baker played Susan Connors. Ashleigh played the role well, however she lacked the emotional depth and appropriate energy to make us sympathize with what was already a poorly written character. I walked in to the theatre expecting this One Act to make me emotional or at least make me feel some connection, as Im often a sucker for things like that. However, the tone of the piece from the beginning was slow and dragging, which immediately set the wrong impression for the audience. Its a play about suicide, so the audience is weary about seeing it from the get-go. Then to have it start off slowly and with such reluctance, it pretty much ensured that all sympathy would be lost. This, however, is not a fault of Ms. Baker as much as it is of the director(s). The show continued at the slow pace, even slowing down as it progressed.From the very beginning, we are introduced to Ashleighs character Susan. Susan has just attempted to commit suicide. Why? Well, Im still not really sure. The show goes into detail about the events leading up to her attempt, but never really explains Susans mental state and why it affected her so deeply. This, again, is not so much a fault of Ms. Bakers. However, even with what little the script gave her, she still lacked the emotional depth to show such a strong interior conflict. It felt as if she decided to commit suicide because she woke up one day and wasnt happy. I couldnt see that she had been struggling for years with depression, that the circumstances in her life drove her down a dark tunnel to which she believed there was no way out. Most importantly, I couldnt see throughout the course of the show that there was any change emotionally in Susan. Is she going to choose to live or die? I have no idea, because we did not receive any contextual clues from her performance on how reliving these events affected her.The most important task of creating a character is to make them 3D, or complex. Before a character is complex, it is 2D or static. That means that the character undergoes no major emotional shift or changes throughout the show, thus making them secondary and not interesting to the audience. One would assume in a show focused on one girls suicide attempt, that character would be as complex as it gets. However, I left The Girl in the Mirror feeling that I had watched almost 45 minutes of static, waiting to change the channel. Ms. Baker didnt show a shift, didnt show thought, and didnt make us sympathize with Susan, although I honestly find the script at fault just as much as her performance. I was extremely disappointed with the lack-luster script. It was a very interesting concept (ripped off by the recent film If I Stay) however it failed to take flight, even for a one-act play.