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But Prugh, who has found a playfully like-minded director in Adam Fitzgerald, attempts something more than a mere slice-of-life evening, and it's in that "something more" that the limits of her concept becoming apparent. Not content to focus merely on tomboyish new girl Fiona (Lori Prince) and the perky friend Margo (Autumn Hurlbert), with whom Fiona doesn't realize she's in love, Fiona's exasperated friend Ian (Debargo Sanyal), and Margo's would-be boyfriend Henry (Eric T. Miller), Prugh also attempts to examine how these relationships evolve and shift over the next 25 years or so, but does so with an overly tangled complexity that prevents the play's simple joys from taking lasting root. Affixed atop the schoolyard saga are not one but two additional conceptual devices: a malleable time frame, in which the late-30s crew look back and comment on their younger selves; and the acknowledged reality of unreality, that all of this is nothing more than a theatrical show that each of them narrates in turn and commands (as far as lights, sets, stage directions, and so on) as the situation demands. If all of this is successful at conveying the dubious benefit of keeping you on your toes as to whom, when, and why you're watching, Prugh fails to make clear why that's important, or what insight it has to impart on a narrative that otherwise is bereft of it. Or, to be more accurate, two narratives. The young Fiona does not conduct a romance of any discernible sort with Margo ("I thought homosexual was only something that happened to men," she explains in her later years), leaving Prugh and her characters to shuffle their feet around various children's shenanigans ranging from video games to going-to-movies politics to playground taunting to the kickball tournament at the anticlimactic core of the second act. But when the older Fiona and Margo must confront their feelings and unite the combating threads of plot, there's not enough momentum for them to do so. Far more care has been expended in burnishing to a blinding sheen these people's personalities than their emotions. That's why, though Fitzgerald would be well served to tone down the volume and the intensity of his actors' line deliveries, especially given the difficult acoustics of the gymnasium-like playing space (which set designer David L. Arsenault has cleverly filled with chalkboard and construction-paper scenery), the performers are far more compelling as the youngsters than their adult counterparts. The energy Hurlbert, by far the standout of the cast, invests into the perky but secretly hurting 12-year-old Margo is captivating, and seldom moreso than when she writhes athletically about the playing space in one of her bubbly, caffeinated fits. Her despondent adult self, saddled with children, a flailing career, and an unhappy marriage, is a cliché Hurlbert can make honest if not credible, but the Margo of a quarter-century earlier is thrillingly, hilariously recognizable as a girl too inexperienced to know she can't be everything at once. Sanyal is, in his corresponding scenes, nearly as good, balancing Ian's nerdiness with an affable likability that lets you see how he could be the popular boy's friend. He overplays the more frantic moments of his underwritten, closeted character, and the older version is entirely bereft of specificity, but overall he finds plenty of fun in the part. That's where Prince falters: She makes both incarnations of Fiona self-consciously heavy, which weighs down the show's center, though the resigned streak she puts into the mature Fiona gives her some much-needed depth. Miller is acceptable as both Henry and Margo's eventual husband, Hal, but doesn't break through the stereotypes as completely as the others can. It's Only Kickball, Stupid has a similar problem, though it's not for Prugh's lack of trying—she's just juggling too many ideas to have time to connect enough of the dots that would let us see why any of this matters. Unhappy marriages and unrequited love are hardly new topics, and without additional connective tissue to bridge the decades the play covers, we're forced to look at the two halves of the show on their own terms, and the one set in 1988 just sports a more original and tantalizing style and voice. If these delightful kids have more to offer their future selves than optimism and promise, like so many when asked what they did at school on any given day, their lips are presently sealed.
It's Only Kickball, Stupid
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