Review of Walkabout Theater's Crow

Once upon a time I went to a show and it was called Crow. It is about this guy named Donald Crowhurst (Jeremy Sher) who enters in a competition to see if he can travel around the world in a boat. And if he gets first place he will get a lot of money and a big trophy as well. And this trip wouldn't have been possible without Mr. Best who was not at all the best--his name was totally misleading--who gave him money for the boat that he would sail in. But it was kind of a crappy boat because it didn't have all the safety things it needed--like things to make it not leak and tip over. And that's why it was so crappy, so he couldn't really sail in it without dying or killing himself. So, right before he went missing he went a little crazy. He was writing in his journal, which they found later, and he wrote some really weird things about how it was on the boat. So he would lie a lot right before he died, which meant it might have been about his family or about if he was going really crazy. It is about a guy going crazy on a boat while he was in a contest and had children and a wife, so I suspect they missed him a lot after he died, and I feel sorry for all of them. You should not take any little kids to see this. It is too sad. Adults should see it because I think they would find it very touching, and I like it even though I am a kid--but I'm not very little.

I really liked the scene where Donald was reading his wife's fortune and saying how many children she would have and that she would have a husband that loves her. He was very drunk when he did this. I think he was at a fair or a bar or has had 20 flights of different beers. He just holds a ball of rope and that's her hand or a fortune-telling ball. If you are wondering why I have not mentioned any other actors, don't blame me because there are no others. They chose to just do a one man performance with rope because there are lots of ropes on boats and there was only one person on the boat. It tells you that he is all alone on this boat and the rope is his family and his friends. His baby is also made out of rope, which is a little bit freaky, as you can understand. And he also used rope as a telephone to talk to Mr. Best. He ties ropes together to make different things that will help him on his long journey. He is connecting ropes like his family tree and stringing them together like it is his family tree. He misses his family and wants to go back to them. But he can't.

Donald had a best friend who was a bird on the boat. His name was Albert, and he was a seagull, and Donald would have conversations with him. In those conversations, Albert would ask him things about God and about Albert Einstein. I think this also showed how much Donald was going crazy because he was talking to a bird who couldn't understand what he was saying. The bird was named Albert, named after Albert Einstein, because Donald was very very interested in Albert Einstein because he was interested in getting to the horizon. Einstein is interested in space and time and so is Donald because he is traveling around the world. Time is important to him because he wants to get around the world in the right time. Space is important to him because he doesn't want to get lost, which he does.

I thought the scenes with projections by Liviu Pasare were really awesome. I thought the projections were really awesome and cool because they showed us that Donald was really going crazy. So he would be going crazy with letters; letters were coming like up all around him on the screens that were also sails. I thought the screens being sails was a really good idea because you didn't have to pull down a screen or anything and you would already have things that could be used as screens. There were also these scenes where they put projections of like squiggly lines on the TV which are called statics which means on your TV that your program is broken and that is not good. But at this time it just happened behind people. In the play it also went on his face which was very cool but not very realistic. There are lots of different scenes with his video camera. He is shooting things to send to his wife or Mr. Best and on to the news. Sometimes he is talking to Mr. Best, and sometimes he is telling people on the tv how he is doing--bad but he said good. And that's the lying I was talking about. I think it showed well how he wanted his life to be. I mean that he wanted to win and he wanted to be a rich man and that he was going to be a rich man and was going to be famous and was going to be loved by everybody. But he double wasn't going to be. When he is talking into the video camera, he seems very cheerful and he seems like he's going to be very successful in the immediate future. But he is really not.

I think this show should be for ages 7 and up because it is very sad and I think 7-year-olds can handle sad things. People that would like this show are people that like Albert Einstein, seagulls, and rope. I loved this show because it is a really touching and awesome show.

Photos: Emma Stanton