Breathing Time
With Breathing Time , Beau Willimon has crafted a thoroughly engaging, provocative play about human connection. Genuinely funny at times, poignant at others and deliciously acerbic in between, Breathing Time is, essentially, a character study seeking to find out what happens when strangers are thrown together, linked by a bond of shared experience. The three-scene play (directed by Aaron Rossini ) begins with the arrogant Jack ( Craig Wesley Divino , who delivers with a smarmy yet appealing performance) walking into the office he shares with Mike ( Lee Dolson ). Jack is still hungover from the previous night’s festivities, but he has an important, possibly career-changing presentation to give in one hour and fourteen minutes. (Jack’s precise and, in this play, timing is important.) Most of this first scene, which takes up the majority of the play, is deceptively innocuous—two guys nattering on about this or that. Some exchanges are raunchy and funny, others are sincere and i...