‘Wonder of the World’ wows audiences

As a hilarious investigation of some very earnest and relatable troubles, “Wonder of the World,” a play by David Lindsay-Abaire and the senior work of Christine Chung ’10 and Oscar Loyo ’10, is able to pose emotionally probing situations and questions (“Has your house ever been so quiet you thought you might stop breathing?”) in a playful script filled with pithy dialogue and side-bending non-sequiturs.

The play doesn’t spare a second, throwing its audience into a strong scene between the work’s capricious heroine, Cass, played by Chung, and her unfortunately normal husband Kip, played by Greg Selover ’10.

In minutes the scene paints an image of the most normal of marriages, substantiated by clichés of happy marital life: flower shows in Westchester, a George Foreman grille.

Selover’s movingly desperate portrait of a man who has come home for lunch only to find that his wife is leaving him was matched only by Chung’s whimsical cruelty. Cass oozes the excitement of someone who has just been liberated from a state of attentive blindness and has awoken wide-eyed through the jarring shock of a traumatic discovery.

Minutes into the play, with the looming mystery of why she is leaving her husband, Cass has pushed through the end of her old life to embark on a new one and boards a bus from Brooklyn to Niagara Falls. Hoping to make a dent in her life’s checklist of 200 things she has always wanted to do — learn Swedish, sleep with a stranger, get a sidekick — Cass meets Lois, her perfect counterpart no matter how you spin it.

While Cass is full of excitement to explore a new world, Lois is suicidal, planning to throw herself over the falls in a pickle barrel. While Cass bursts with excitement at every passing road sign, Lois sits in a drunken stupor. Cass has just left her husband, while Lois’ husband has just left her. Catherine Lidstone ’10 did a wonderful job at delivering the honestly cynical and flat one-liners that made the audience love Lois maybe even more then they loved Cass.

When the mystery of Kip’s secret is finally unveiled, it does not disappoint. Any woman who finds out that her husband has been swallowing Barbie doll heads for sexual pleasure can’t be blamed for hopping on the next bus to absolutely anywhere.

Clean-cut Kip is not so wholesome and you can’t help but think, what else is hiding in the sweater drawer? The play continues to spin its eccentric web in the second act, already having proved that anything is possible.

Cass and Lois run into their fair share of situations (a helicopter ride, and a dangerous encounter with Niagara falls, to name a few) and people that lead Cass to the painfully clichéd ending of a quirky, offbeat production.

If anything was disappointing about this play, it was not found in the actors but in the script itself. Cass struggles with her own carefree attitude leaving the audience unconvinced and even irritated by her blithe self-absorption.

Life cannot be lived according to a checklist, sure, but the audience was hoping for more.

Despite a problematic fog machine (smoke detectors, a fire alarm) the crew’s ability to mold the stage was impressive and relied upon sensory engagement through the creatively masterful use of set, sound and lighting. The actors worked well together to fuse personalities and concepts into a dark comedy that, although lacking in answers, dared to question the comfortable standards of quotidian life.