The Typographer's Dream
Kate Hampton and Dan Snook
in The Typographer’s Dream
(Photo: Mahlon Stewart)
As Margaret the Typographer, Meg MacCary has the fewest lines of the show, but makes a great impact. With the demeanor of an inhibited dreamer, a closet passionata wrapped in an uptight eccentric, MacCary conveys to us the total magic of her chosen field, its "rigor" and "clarity." In commercial typography, she realizes her power -- she can represent a product to "look exciting, look serious, look fun, look valuable, seem healthy. So I did. Because that was my goddamn job."
The latter is a quintessentially American phrase conveying the roiling emotional tension not entirely beneath her surface, or that of the play. We learn quickly that Margaret, like Annalise the Geographer and David the Stenographer, is both defined by her job and defines herself against it. Thus we learn about them primarily through their jobs for the first half of the show, through projected slides of steno machines from which David explains his profession -- not court reporter, stenographer -- and slides of maps through which Annalise shares her obsession with them.
A Canadian played by Kate Hampton with a deliberately American accent which throws her rare maple-leaf-land "eh" into comical relief, Annalise is the most bold of the three in many respects; she is order-obsessed like the others, but more self-confident. We hear of the nearly comprehensive field of geography in grandiose terms, and of the powerful lines which divide countries, between wondrous hues that can color whole nations, like the former Soviet Union, pink on a given cartograph. Soon, however, Annalise confronts David (Dan Snook), whose job is to be a neutral witness without opinion or personality, a human recorder of the crises and cataclysms of others, about his unconscious self-effacement.
As David recoils, defending his relationship with Bob, who is apparently a drunk, Annalise stalks him like a predator, making observations that are both cold and highly personal about David's subconsciously self-diminishing speech patterns. As the tension between them ratchets up, we begin to learn more about the friendships which engage them all. Director Drew Barr does a terrific job handling both the isolation of these characters and their struggle to connect, and the aesthetic of the show is highly unified and professional.