Review: Hotel Oracle

Hotel Oracle is a play about "peregrinations and post-its." For those who don't know what peregrinations are (I was in the club when I entered Walkerspace last night), a peregrination is a journey, or a travel. Indeed, Hotel Oracle is populated by a motley crew of travellers, all unfulfilled in their own ways, all searching for an answer to their emptiness. There's a no-nonsense reporter, a self-help guru seeking clients, a winsome expectant mother, a possibly-mad scientist, and a mysterious shaggy-haired hipster, all greeted by an unsettlingly even-keeled clerk at the Hotel Oracle. He welcomes them, and us, to a dreamlike world where sounds are bottled up and stored in jars, walls are paper-thin, and everyone is quietly hungering for something.

A vast loneliness quietly percolates through Bixby Elliot's haunting play, smartly produced by The Sum Of Us Theatre Company. The setting is at first strange, even disorienting, but the doubts, fears, and questions the characters carry are immensely relatable to all of our human hopes and fears. "Do you find me attractive?" "Will she ever love me again?" "Will I ever be happy?" Elliot (a recent grad of Columbia's playwrighting program) deftly manipulates these questions with the lightest touch, illuminating not the answers, but the painful human experience of articulating the questions at all. Happily, the serious, poetic tones are seasoned with a healthy dose of humor and reality, making the themes very palatable and preventing the characters from ever taking themselves too seriously.

The play's poetry and near-experimental feel could be too challenging for a lesser company. Sometimes it seems that downtown theater is plagued by overambitious productions that make a lot of noise but are able to say very little. The Sum Of Us is not one of these companies - Nicholas Vaughn's creates many locations out of a sparse set, and along with lighting designed by Anjeanette Stokes and costumes by Donald Sanders (associate of none other than William Ivey Long), the world of Hotel Oracle is both ironic and serious, cozy and ominous.

It's also SO nice to see an ensemble of such fine actors who are able to live in the play with such gentle sensitivity. Katie Honaker particularly stands out as a cheerful, chatty woman who seems to hardly notice her very-pregnant state. The performances are skillfully directed by Stephen Brackett, who keeps things action-driven rather than philosophy-driven, letting the most thought-provoking elements of the play speak for themselves.

Clocking in at two hours, the play might benefit from a few trimmings here and there, especially since the real action (the aggressive hunt for answers from the Oracle) begins near the end of Act One. Of course, it must be acknowleged that I saw the first preview, and things are very likely to pick up as performances continue.

Hotel Oracle runs at Walkerspace through March 31st. Do you have reservations?

Photo of Katie Honaker and Tessa Gibbons by Becky Holladay.