The word that comes to mind when I look back at AMERICARING is ‘Baffling’. Writer Kate Gille and director Frank Licato paint a world full of baffling scripting, directorial, and staging decisions. It ranges from little thing, such as the decision to have characters adding and removing generic “Set-piece cubes” mid scene, to a meandering script that peppers the show with an endless barrage of groan inducing soap-opera dialogue.
While not the most egregious, the most obvious and repetitive example was the decision to have every scene open with a
loud, monotone voice announce the location.
SCHOOL. ANNE’S HOUSE. OUTSIDE THE DANCE. THE LAKE. THE END OF MY ROPE
The first two times it happens I thought it was a weird technical issue, but by the end I was white knuckling the top of every scene trying not to burst into laughter.
AMERICARING tries to be about many things: Class in America, doomed adolescent romance, a two-tiered healthcare system, broken family dynamics, addiction, childhood innocence lost, childhood innocence found, cycles of abuse, and on and on and on. But a weak script and sloppy direction leave every one of these ideas half baked, at best. Ultimately, what AMERICARING ends up being about is a tepid regurgitation of D.A.R.E infused moral panic that
osculates somewhere between a rejected Lifetime Original movie and Go Ask Alice.
The enable cast admirably gives it their all, eliciting a few chuckles or bleeding drops of applause from the stone of a script they were given, but fall just shy of redeeming any singular aspect of the production. The worst sin you can commit in theater is being boring, and I stopped americaring about any of it by ANNE’S HOUSE.
The Independent Artists movement 