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by Lin-Manuel Miranda
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”
Thornton Wilder, Our Town
There’s an exciting new play making its premiere at this year’s New York International Fringe Festival called The Timing of a Day, and its echoes of Thorton Wilders seminal classic Our Town are inescapable.
Playwright Owen Panettieri paints a deft portrait of three twenty-somethings, Doug, Josh, and Paige, sharing an apartment in what at first seems to be an average New York day. Mr. Panettieri’s ear for dialogue is remarkable in that first scene, which is funny and frank and incredibly paced (props to director Joey Brenneman, who keeps the whole show moving at an electric pace) every New Yorker will recognize a glimpse of their own hectic mornings, down to a reference to the soothing visage of NY1’s morning anchor Pat Kiernan.
There is a heartbreaker of a plot twist at the end of this first scene, however, and over the next seven scenes, we hopscotch through the lives of Doug, Josh and Paige chronologically, observing how they met, and their fumbling steps towards (and away from) adulthood.
By the end of the play, not only will you feel as if you have spent 90 minutes with three old friends, you’ll feel what Thornton Wilder’s Emily declared so memorably at the end of Our Town – that dizzying awareness of life, in the moment you are living it.
(The Timing of a Day has two more performances, Aug. 25 at 5:45 p.m. and Aug. 28 at 7:45 p.m. Visit www.fringenyc.org http://www.fringenyc.org/ for tickets.)
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