Five strangers on a long-distance train ride uncover unexpected connections with each other — and within themselves — in “The Magic Castle Still Stands,” an eerie original play from writer Vanessa Frances and co-director Emily Kucala. Amelia Bryant stars as Harvey, an anxious young woman in mourning for her mother, who is taking her first solo trip to New York City. After their journey is derailed by an disturbing tragedy, Harvey bonds with Mikey (Ella Hadley), a chatterbox teen sharing her compartment, and discovers that Mikey’s BFF bears a spooky similarity to Iris (Victoria Lobdell), her elusive elementary school confidante.
Frances’s enigmatic script, which contains echoes of Jacob’s Ladder and The Twilight Zone (as well as more literary inspirations from Hesse and Dostoevsky), at first appears to be a supernatural thriller, before cleverly evolving into a psychological drama. The parental figures in the cast are annoying stock characters that are mostly around to argue, but the younger actors are uniformly excellent. Hadley gives an impressively grounded, natural performance as a child of divorced parents; and Lobdell and Bryant invest their intense emotional bond with unaffected familiarity far beyond their tender years.
The final scene unsatisfyingly introduces an eleventh-hour element that feels underdeveloped, and I wish the slow, silent scene changes were sped up by 500%. But those are forgivable flaws in a Fringe show such as this that features fresh, young voices in an imaginative, introspective story.
Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “The Magic Castle Still Stands”
Seth Kubersky
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