A rental agreement you’ll be eager to break.
The Good Landlord, running at the Omnibus Theatre from November 18-22, is a production that boldly attempts to channel the absurd dark comedy of Beckett to tackle the modern day housing crisis. While the production’s heart seems firmly in the right place, its execution is marred by inconsistent writing, baffling directorial decisions, and visible on-stage struggles.
The show makes clear its central premise that landlords are bad for society, but struggles to land any meaningful moral blow. Any potential message is immediately muddled by the script’s curious decision to depict every single tenant character as equally awful. This inconsistency was compounded by the show’s partnership with the ACORN renters’ union, resulting in the inclusion of several clunky, didactic facts about renters’ rights that felt jarringly shoehorned in and actively worked against the play’s supposed absurdist tone.
The characters, which could have been ripe for nonsensical humor, were instead hugely inconsistent. One particularly bizarre and limiting choice saw an actor reduced to wheezing and panting for nearly half the run time, a decision that served only to derail the pace and confuse the narrative.
The cast’s struggle became increasingly visible as the show progressed. Roughly halfway through the run, the actors seemed to realize the disconnect with the audience and began adding in extra, unscripted physical moments or extending some repetitive dialogue in an attempt to garner laughs. This desperation only further robbed the show of any remaining pace and visibly confused their fellow performers on stage.
Though obviously a low-budget production, some design choices were baffling. The stage featured two doors that refused to close properly, failed to move as doors should, and were entirely unnecessary for the script. These cumbersome props became a repeated source of frustration, with the actors struggling to use them at multiple points. Technical failings added to the sense of amateurism, with several lighting and sound cues being missed and forcing the cast to improvise around the errors.
The Good Landlord clearly had ambitions to be subversive and radical, and it certainly achieved a level of bizarre spectacle. Unfortunately, bizarre is not enough to make a successful theatrical experience. The result is a confused, inconsistent, and ultimately unsatisfying night out.