History, a Mild Aphrodisiac for Today
Charles IsherwoodSeptember 29, 2010: Everyone brings emotional baggage into a relationship, but the young twosome in “Now Circa Then,” a new comedy by Carly Mensch at Ars Nova, aren’t just lugging their own drama behind them. Also stuffed into their spiritual suitcases are the histories of a pair of dead strangers, Prussian immigrants from the 19th century named Julian and Josephine Glockner. In their jobs as tour guides and “re-enactors” in a tenement museum on the Lower East Side, Gideon (Stephen Plunkett) and Margie (Maureen Sebastian) portray the poor but enterprising Glockners. Meeting does not get much cuter than this, and the early scenes of “Now Circa Then,” directed by Jason Eagan, bubble with comic promise. Dolled up in skin-shrouding period costumes, Gideon and Margie make like animated waxworks in a historical diorama. From their perches in a perfectly preserved facsimile of a 19th-century tenement apartment — the atmospheric set is by Lauren Helpern — they dispense nuggets of information about the immigrant experience. And they soon find that the life stories of the exemplary strivers they are impersonating begin to subtly influence their own.
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