Reviewed by Jodi Yeats

Billed as a “slacker road trip”, The Intricate Art of Actually Caring is a witty and complex play, where the friends Eli and Jack keep their own names and the script playfully blends fiction and biography.

Reviewed by Jodi Yeats

Billed as a “slacker road trip”, The Intricate Art of Actually Caring is a witty and complex play, where the friends Eli and Jack keep their own names and the script playfully blends fiction and biography.

The guys have hilarious circular conversations, full of banter and occasional forays into poetry. Add to that their managing clever use of “low tech” props and you get a hilarious and utterly contemporary piece of theatre.

Eli and Jack are profoundly shaken by their friend Johnny’s death at his own 21st birthday. When Eli regrets encouraging Johnny to drink the yard glass, it is a prescient reminder (written a couple of years ago) of teenage deaths relating to binge drinking yet to come.

Johnny’s death inspires the friends to take a road trip to Jerusalem as a homage to Baxter, who is Eli’s mother’s uncle and a hero of Jack’s. Even though Eli professes to have no interest in poetry, the play he has penned has several lovely poems in it and is sprinkled with literary references.

En route to Jerusalem, Jack and Eli confront the difficulties of caring - as young Kiwi men, members of the “me generation” and slackers. Yet as they struggle with their feelings and the ways they try to escape from feeling, they also find they do care, for instance, for their parents and Johnny. Their care for each other is profoundly challenged by the loss of their shared friend.

A highlight for me was the low budget props. There are two overhead projectors in use throughout with act titles, drawings, photos and objects creating projected collages. When the lads are driving each sits on an office chair holding a headlight that is turned on thanks to long extension leads.

The Intricate Art of Actually Caring is packed with funny, creative ideas and it has been really well adapted to the Basement, from its 2009 debut in writer Eli Kent’s bedroom. The play will be touring some more this year and is definitely worth a look.

The Intricate Art of Actually Caring
Written by Eli Kent
Directed by Eleanor Bishop
The Playground Collective