Fun in the cards for '52 Pick-Up'

ACT I Productions amuses with ease as it shuffles love story

DESOTO – When you get to the Corner Theatre in DeSoto to see 52 Pick-Up, they invite you to shuffle and cut a deck of cards. Under the right conditions, you could even win a million dollars.

Not likely. The two actors throw the deck into the air at the beginning of the show. In the course of the play, they pick up the cards at random and act out the mini-scene named on it. They only give you the money if you come back and see the show and it turns out to be in the same order as the first one you attended.

Statistically, if you performed this play by T.J. Dawe and Rita Bozi for the 10 billion or so years the universe has existed, you wouldn't have begun to exhaust the number of ways it could go.

That doesn't mean the plot changes every time the order changes. Think of 52 Pick-Up as theatrical cubism – showing you the same thing from many different angles.

The story it tells is a simple romance – if romance is ever simple. We see the first meeting of a young man and woman, the second meeting. An encounter one year after they break up, and one two years after. (Not necessarily in that order, of course.) Each scene gives us a moment in the relationship – a moment or two of sheer bliss, and a lot of moments in which she tries to change him or in which he refuses to talk about the relationship.

What draws the two together, mostly, is physical attraction. Otherwise, they are pretty different. She has lived all over the world. He remembers a trip to Tulsa as a major event. He likes coffee, she likes tea. She has a cat and smokes cigarettes. He's not crazy about either.
Oh yeah, they both like marijuana.

52 Pick-Up doesn't make modern relationships look like much fun. The play itself is a lot of fun, though. There's guilty pleasure in observing the inner workings of a romance between two good-looking young people.

Actors Leslie Patrick and Jeremy Stein make the most of the script, with the help of director Robin Armstrong. Ms. Patrick has appeared in a lot of area shows, but this one showcases her talent much more effectively. Mr. Stein, a new face, looks natural and expressive onstage – he's a natural.

The most impressive thing about their performance is the emotional transitions they make between the random scenes, even though there's no rhyme or reason to the sequence. They make the whole thing look smooth and emotionally coherent.

Lawson Taitte
The Dallas Morning News
January 23, 2004