Show reviewed:  Lonely Planet

Playwright:  Steven Dietz

Date saw the show:  July 22, 2008
Place saw the show: Kansas City Fringe Festival, Kansas City, Missouri
Company: Third Man Productions
Principal Leads: Kevin Albert; Joel Moses
Director:  Julia Moriarty 

Reviewed By:  Deborah Ground Buckner (Kansas City Correspondent – USA) 

Steven Dietz received the PEN U.S.A. Award in Drama for Lonely Planet, written in 1993, in the midst of growing awareness of AIDS.  The play still has a powerful message, as demonstrated by Third Man Productions' staging for the Kansas City Fringe Festival.

Jody (Kevin Albert) operates a map shop, “Jody's Maps,” which does not appear to be a thriving business.  His one regular visitor (and not a customer) is Carl (Joel Moses).  Carl brings a dose of life into Jody's small world, filled with stories of a variety of professions, not one of which Carl actually practices.  In his first entrance, Carl launches into a speech about how everyone bores him.  Moses allows the rant to escalate (“a yawn starts in my groin and ends in their eyes”), and I found myself recalling the tirades Michael J. Fox used to spiel as Alex Keaton on the old series, “Family Ties.”

Carl brings more than his stories into Jody's shop.  He also brings a chair.  And another.  As the play continues, the small shop becomes crowded with chairs of different sizes and designs, each chair representing another friend who has died of AIDS.  While Jody stays secluded in his shop, forgetting the world outside, Carl keeps bringing these solemn reminders to him. 

Left alone, Jody dwells on the subject of his business:  maps.  He explains “the Greenland problem,” how the design of the Mercator map makes Greenland, actually about the size of Mexico, appear to be twice the size of South America.  But the map was designed to aid in getting from one point to another, not to show the actual sizes of countries.  “We must accept certain distortions,” Jody acknowledges. Also on display in the shop, Jody has an image of Earth captured by the crew of Apollo 17, showing “a great big, lonely planet surrounded by darkness.”

The metaphors of the maps and the empty chairs are the stuff of sober drama, but the message is accompanied by the fun of watching a developing friendship between Jody and Carl, the value of which comes to light in the moments when each truly needs a friend.  Along the way, there are enough entertaining stories and comic lines (for example, “It's a mystery—like people who buy jackets with fringe on them” and “He avoided me like I was carrying a clipboard at an airport.”) to keep the story moving.   

The rich characterizations of Jody and Carl make this so much more than a play about AIDS.  It becomes a play of sad and frightening things happening to real people we know and like—the most powerful way to deliver its message.