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The Cross

nytheatre.com review by David Hilder
August 15, 2005

In his solo piece The Cross, Toby Wherry plays a man whose job it will be to walk from one point on the stage to another. For nearly an hour, he explores why he would make such a move—what is either compelling him toward point B, or driving him away from point A. This is a long-form exploration of an actor’s motivation, but unfortunately it adds up to little more than navel-gazing.Beginning with a banjo setting of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (though that choice, specific as it is, is never clearly integrated into the play itself), The Cross becomes almost entirely an exploration of this man’s relationships with various women—all imaginary—he might be going to meet, and who seem to cause him a fair amount of angst. But the women, the crucial other characters in the play, never hold interest, despite some nicely detailed descriptive writing. In fact, The Cross only really comes to life when Wherry talks about two men: the man one of his ex-girlfriends ends up with, and the man who gives him his driving test. Otherwise, without any actual investment in the choices he’s making (because, after all, we’re ultimately examining an actor’s choice to make sense of taking five steps), the audience is left with no reason to care.Laura Strausfeld’s direction is vague. Wherry has a tendency to lose breath before the ends of some of his longer phrases. And so The Cross adds up to less than the sum of its evanescent parts.