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TENT PRESS
"Jenkin offers a quiet little love story that magically extends beyond humdrum existence… what gives Shakey Jake its potency and unusual charm is the poetic way the playwright infuses his comfortably familiar story with magical realism.
The Tent’s production, sensitively directed by Aimée Hayes, supports the play with blue moonlight from designer Mary Louise Geiger and very subtle sound design by John Kilgore… above the action, scenic designer Alexander Woodward has suspended a long, beautifully weathered tree limb that might suggest the way one’s life may twist yet endure over the years. Beneath its branches, Jason Bowen and Delfin Gökhan Meehan lend melodious voices and playful attitudes to their ageless, magical beings. In contrast, the performances by Fred Weller and Kate Arrington appear ultra-natural as they first dance around romance and later wise up to eternal love."
—Michael Sommers
"The new play by the downtown legend Len Jenkin mixes a tender love story with some darker, stranger magic. There’s enormous restraint in the dramatic architecture of How Is It That We Live, or Shakey Jake + Alice, a new play by the downtown theater legend Len Jenkin. The production is simple—befitting the small space–but elegant and carrying its own witchy magic.
If Jake and Alice are very ordinary Midwesterners, the Speakers are something else entirely, and their unsettling presence gives the piece an unsettling energy. Bearers of a doomed love story (or series of them) of their own, these two wear many guises and many darkly whimsical names—Clarence Nightingale and Sweet Lucy; Evangeline and Snake Hips and Little Sister—and there’s a whiff of brimstone and chaos whenever they’re around. The poetry of Jenkin’s language, as much prose as dialogue, rests here, and Bowen and Meehan embody its haunted slipperiness beautifully, as these characters slip in and out of time and spin yarns that are neither truth nor lie but something else entirely. Director Aimée Hayes has a sure grip on the differences of tone baked into the levels of reality; nothing in this play is ever entirely realistic."
—Lauren Novek
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