HANNAN AND MARTIN at TimeLine Theatre Company

Okay, so Ben Affleck is really dumb, and Matt Damon is kinda lucky. That's the premise of MATT AND BEN, the hit Off-Broadway play, which recently opened at The Theatre Building. As in the original, two women with no physical resemblances to the title characters, play them, as they wrestle with scriptwriting just before GOOD WILL HUNTING was made, and changed their lives forever.

What starts out as a dumb joke about dumb actors does eventually grow into something more, as the young men battle with what to do with a script that falls out of the sky, called GOOD WILL HUNTING. Still, the 65 minute show never transcends its premise to become a play about living, breathing characters.

It's no surprise to discover that this show started out as a hit at New York's Fringe Festival, an appropriate venue for its irreverent comedy, which also pokes fun at Gwyneth Paltrow and J.D. Salinger, whose "Catcher in the Rye", the boys are attempting to adapt into a disastrous screenplay.

The performances are solid, and channels Affleck's speech patterns and body language in surprising ways, but this MATT AND BEN is pretty thin.

A heavier pair can be found at the Timeline Theatre's remounting of last season's successful historical drama, HANNAH AND MARTIN. Also based on two famous real life figures, HANNAH AND MARTIN sticks closer to actual events, tracing the love affair between Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the philosopher Martin Heidegger in pre-war Germany.

Arendt begins as a nervous student, in awe of her teacher, Heidegger, but quickly falls into a romantic relationship with him. Arendt's happiness and newfound confidence is, however, short lived, crumbling when she is sent by Heidegger to study with his former teacher, Karl Jaspers, played with avuncular care by Larry Baldacci. Only later, after she has married another philosopher, does Heidegger really come back into her life, and the lives of all other German Jews, when he joins onto the Nazi party.

Timeline has brought back almost all of the original creative team
to once again showcase two fine performers and playwright Kate
Fodor's quietly thrilling script, which doesn't unnecessarily trump
up the already difficult and conflicted relationship between the title characters. Under Jeremy B.Cohen's energetic, smart staging, HANNAH AND MARTIN, moves inevitably toward the more traditional, more emotional second act, where longer scenes allow Hannah to finally confront Martin, and hopefully get the explanation she is looking for.

You can't help but feel contempt for Martin, as his chances for redemption slip away with every minute of wrongheaded conversation with his former student, and this is the only place where Fodor's script lets us down , though just barely.
Hannah, herself, talks of things not being only black and white, yet Martin is black, even if he won't allow himself to see himself that way. Allowing for even less interpretation is Martin's wife Elfride, played with gusto by Danica Ivancevic, as the epitome of the Aryan woman. Fodor is careful here, to present Elfride as a conception of how Hannah sees her to be. It is only in the final scenes, that she is seen through the audiences' eyes, and, although she is clearly a villain, we see her as a much more tragic figure, a figure Hannah must also reconcile with her previous ideas.

As Hannah and Martin, actors Elizabeth Rich and David Parkes are the stars of this show, altering their characters from youthful exuberance to regretful old age, from1924 to 1946. In fact, their power is strong enough that it makes one doubt the life of the play without them. In Timeline's compact space, it is easy to see the subtleties of their characterizations, as they inhabit Brian Sidney Bembridge's cleverly designed set.

It isn't every day that a literate and thoughtful examination of our shared histories can also be a romantic and tragic love story. HANNAH AND MARTIN is that play.