The topic of sexual assaults on American college campuses has been a dark but understandably necessary area for theatre for the last half decade or so. It’s an avenue that allows for extremely emotional and difficult explorations of trauma, cover-ups and criminality, yet it is also fruitful ground for nuanced explorations of human interactions, particularly those of emotionally charged but not always mature young minds. Midnight Building, by Makaio Toft and Aryan Bhattacharjee, is trying very hard to be the latter of these. Unfortunately, it doesn’t succeed in almost any of the ways they presumably hoped it might.
It’s the story of Adam (Bhattacharjee), a preppy Indian boy on a scholarship visa, and Blake (Toft), a punkish queer girl, who meet at a café one day to discuss the assault of a mutual acquaintance. What complicates matters is that the victim in question is now Adam’s partner, as well as an old friend of Blake’s, who was once the target of her affections. But it’s not a friendly chat by any means.
The gist of the action revolves around a continued and circular argument between Adam and Blake. She wants him to make her old flame report the crime, while he wants her to leave them alone to their happiness. But neither comes across as a likeable person, and both have utterly selfish motivations as well as their own hidden traumas behind their actions.
It’s a bold move to make both the main characters in a play almost entirely dislikable from the outset, but the script manages to reinforce this as it continues by making both of them here so self-involved as to be utterly irredeemable. Adam is borderline misogynist and willing to ignore a sexual assault, and thus fails to garner much sympathy beyond the blackmail he’s being faced with. Blake on the other hand comes across as having a sensible motivation, but she's also a thief and a blackmailer, and her reasoning behind it becomes increasingly more unhinged as the piece continues.
None of this would be a problem, but it’s also written and structured in a way that becomes occasionally confusing and quite tedious to watch. The play periodically jumps into scenes of the characters justifying themselves to a court of people, although it’s not made clear if it's college staff or a frat house, or someone else entirely. But at times, these monologues seem more like asides, as they reveal things that seem out of kilter with the other scenes, not helped by the fact that, while Bhattacharjee didn’t amaze, he at least put emotion into his lines and even broke into tears at points; Toft on the other hand seemed to be operating in a single gear throughout, repeating the same few physical gesticulations in random orders.
There are also myriad technical issues, which shouldn’t still be present this far into the play’s run at the Fringe. The relentless buzz and hum of an air-con unit and a fan in the venue are forgivable on a hot day, but the actors don’t try to compensate and frequently turn away from the audience, making it harder to make out the occasionally overlapping dialogue. What’s worse, the lighting cues were messy, out of sync and at times clearly wrong, for example, as the finale came, someone plunged the actors into darkness midway through the final speech only to come back on again and fade out a second time.
There’s no way to really put a good shine on this. It’s a bad play, although not necessarily irredeemable and needs work both on- and offstage to salvage it.