Jamestown Post Journal Review by Robert W. Plyler 6/5/2003

'Manifest Destiny Blues' Moves Forward Through Plot, Backward Through History

     BUFFALO - If you like the feeling of seeing things at the very beginning of their history there's a brand new play running in Buffalo you'll want to catch: Manifest Destiny Blues by Kurt Schneiderman.
     The play was the winner of the annual competition for Western New York playwrights which is held by Buffalo Ensemble Theatre. It plays at the New Phoenix Theatre and is collaboratively presented by BET and by Subversive Theatre Company.
     It takes a few minutes to get the idea of this play, but once it's grasped, the run is fascinating.  The plot is a linear, straightforward story of a widowed Greek factory worker in Buffalo, and his two beautiful daughters.
     The girls are named Zoe and Alethea, which mean "life" and "truth" in Greek. Zoe begins the play engaged to marry an Irish-American jock named Liam, whom she has married by the end.
     Zoe is a "good girl," who goes to her job, does what Dad says and what the boss says, and who wears her tight skirts and her sky-high heels, and who looks absolutely wonderful doing it. Adair Luhr is the actress, and a good one at that.
     Alethea is feisty. She wants to go to college, not to get a job and fit in. She wonders about the truth behind the headlines, sometimes, and she thinks that people should do things such as vote and demand their fair share of the nation's wealth.
     Somehow, Liam finds her energy and her sincerity distracting from his admiration of Zoe's charms. Leah Russo is a bundle of energy as the determined Alethea.
     Seeking to avoid causing trouble in her sister's marriage, Alethea tries to build a relationship with Peter Dempsey, but he is just such a thick- as-a-board frat boy, she can't bring herself to be very serious about it.
     Joshua Canfietd is fine as the vacuous Peter. Setn Archer Eljer is equally fine as the questing Liam.
     The cast is rounded out by Phil Knoerzer as the father, certainly one of Buffalo's best and most dependable actors.
     Liam joins the army, because he can't get a paying job and has to live with his wife's family, and in part to remove himself from the temptations in his home.
     What's remarkable about this play is that it moves forward through the plot, but it slides backward through history. When Liam joins the army, he's off to fight in Iraq, but soon we begin to note that it's the first President Bush and the first war in Iraq that's being discussed.
The war gradually becomes Vietnam, then the second World War and then the first, and this continues through invasions of Nicaragua, the disruption of Columbia which made it possible to dig the Panama Canal, and finally ends up at the turn of the previous century, with President William McKinley arriving in Buffalo for the Pan American Exposition, unaware that an assassin waits for him in the crowd.
     The remarkable thing is that it doesn't affect the plot in the slightest. People are consistently urged to live on less, sacrifice, work harder, "just this one time," Those who try to get their fair share are unpatriotic, communistic, rabble rousing, cowardly, selfish loafers.
     There are elements of the play which don't work well. The initial attraction of Liam to Alethea needs strengthening. The father's conversion from accepting victim to speech-making activist is unnaturally without a believable reason. The war wound of his daughter's husband whom he has pointedly disliked, just isn't enough.
     Most of all, the ugly wig in which poor Ms. Russo is forced to work once we get before World War II, badly needs to betaken out to the yard and given the decent burial it deserves.
     Despite this, I thought it was a great night of theater.
     The New Phoenix Theatre is located on North Johnson Park, just off Elmwood Avenue in downtown Buffalo.
     Manifest Destiny Blues continues through July 12 at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings.