NOTHING IS MORE REAL THAN NOTHING
— Samuel Beckett
Dramatist Will Eno doesn’t make it easy on the audience in his 2012 play The Realistic Joneses at the Laguna Playhouse. Viewers are asked to decide whether the play is primarily a comedy or a sober view of the human condition salted with bits of the playwright’s quirky humor. The large press night audience seemed to side with the play’s laughs, but many reviews of earlier productions seemed to lean toward the play’s more mordant side.
The play consists of four characters, two married couples both named Jones. Bob (Joe Spano) and his wife Jennifer (Sorcha Fox) are a suburban couple surprised by the entrance of their new neighbors John (Conor Lovett) and Pony (Faline England). The two pair quickly enter into a conversation that settles into a kind of patter that consists of non-sequiturs and changes in verbal direction that the characters accept like they are speaking in everyday chat.