“This morning I woke up in the spinning hole of momentum,” begins Geoffrey Decas O’Donnell as a self-help devotee in CTown’s THE MOMENTUM, “riding momentum… like a dolphin that just killed a great white shark.” For the three awkward souls in MOMENTUM (O’Donnell Davis, Boo Killebrew, and Jordan Seavey), the great white shark is existential: pain, confusion, loneliness. Uncertainly and desperately, they hold on to a cure (“The Momentum”) that doesn’t work. “Pain is just a myth” they tell themselves, but the corollaries ring hilariously false: “internal organs bursting is a myth”.
Beginning as a amusingly sarcastic and revealing satire of a Landmark Forum-type self-betterment organization, MOMENTUM switches gears for the last third as each actor (also the play’s creators, with Lee Sunday Evans and TJ Witham) takes an extended monologue about heartache or sexual confusion. (Killebrew’s story of post-breakup despair is especially affecting.) What we should make of this is unclear: that our fear and anguish is just down to the complicated romantic entanglements of extended adolescence? Okay, maybe. Accepting that is better than holding on to a hollow cure. [First Unitarian Church] September 5-14, 2013, fringearts.ticketleap.com/the-momentum.