Reviewed by Dr. Tiffany Knight Raymond, PhD
South Park Theatre’s current production brings us into the 21st century with Steven Dietz’s 2016 play, This Random World. The play opens with the reading of an obituary. This turns out to a draft version for the commanding and confidently spoken 30-something woman on stage, Beth (Katherine Ann Kerr). Beth’s thinly tolerant younger brother, Tim (Sam James Lander), is the recipient and keeper of this obituary – as well as an alternative option.
Lander captures Tim’s melancholia as a somewhat directionless late 20-something. Director Richard Weld Bryant thoughtfully balances the sibling energy. Lander counters Kerr’s older sister high energy, and at one point, he utters, “I’m not sad…I’m composting.” Elizabeth Jane Glyptis shines as Tim’s ex-girlfriend, Claire, who was confident she “would outgrow” him. For both of them, the realities of being on the cusp of 30 are at odds with who they thought they would be by then.
The idea of alternate options is at the heart of the play, which is about the ways lives intersect. The audience’s fun and suspense is typically derived from knowing something ahead of the characters and waiting for them to discover the common bond. Dietz gives this a decidedly modern twist. In his Random World, some characters never discover the intersectionality that would bond them, and they remain strangers.
However, director Richard Weld Bryant ensures it’s intriguing, not frustrating. The fact we know and they never do actually enriches the play. It invites “what if” and musing upon one’s own historical interactions with apparent strangers – ones that felt significant and linger with you in unexplained ways, even years later. We live in a world that’s more connected than ever, which heightens the potency of these undiscovered intersectionalities. They suggest that despite our hyper-connected world, we aren’t as connected as we think. We don’t know everything, and there’s a magic in that unknowing.
Dietz continues to surprise. He puts pressure on the traditional mother figure. We are introduced to Scottie (Lynne Martin-Huber) via her children, Beth and Tim. They lament her inability to travel and pair mention of her with her aid, Bernadette (Apryl Lynne Peroney). One immediately conjures a sympathetic view of a feeble, wheelchair-bound old lady in a nursing home.
Martin-Huber brings power to the geriatric. Martin-Huber not only dismantles that vision, but actively hides her traveling gnome status from her kids. She is the renegade, rebellious teen trying to “protect” her family – and herself – from their excessive worry, which she decides is both unnecessary and intrusive. The extent to which her kids have her wrong, and misdirect us as the audience, suggests our overreliance on societal norms. In fact, the vision of Scottie that Beth and Tim describe feels much more “normal” than the actual Scottie we meet, which is destabilizing and uncomfortable given societal expectations of doting mothers.
Relationships are at the play’s core, and extend to Bernadette’s sister, Rhonda (Adrien-Sophia Ann Curry), who works in a funeral home. Curry brings a delightfully memorable quirkiness to Rhonda in their balance of anxiety and adept acceptance of everything from ghost sightings at the funeral home to an unexpected trip abroad.
The first play I saw and reviewed at South Park Theatre was Neil Simon’s 1976, California Suite, on May 8, 2018. Simon created his own Random World by tracing 4 sets of guests in the same hotel room. The third scene starred Brian Edward (also the founder of ‘Burgh Vivant) who absolutely stole the show in his tux as arm candy beard to an aging actress. It seems fitting This Random World is the first play I’ve reviewed since Brian’s untimely passing – at the same theatre where I first saw him perform so memorably and before we’d even met. This Random World is about the intersectionalities that mark all of our lives and makes me grateful for those degrees of separation that brought me into Brian’s orbit. The world and stage is dimmer without Brian’s presence, but for those who knew him, or were lucky enough to experience his craft and wit, it’s a far brighter place. We honor you and miss you Brian.
-TKR, Ph.D.
South Park Theatre’s production of This Random World runs through August 9, 2025 at South Park Theatre, South Park Township, PA, 15129. Purchase tickets online here.
