Play packs a unique take on internal clocks and plenty of laughs


Moxie Theatre

When: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Dec. 16.

Where: 6663 El Cajon Blvd., Rolando District.

Tickets: $20-$27 (discounts available)

Phone: (858) 598-7620


Time flies when you’re watching a play about how time flies (or fails to).

At least when that play is Moxie Theatre’s production of “Hickorydickory,” the witty and bittersweet meditation on mortality from the singular mind of Marisa Wegrzyn. (And forget all the timepieces in the play: What makes this ingenious and underappreciated writer tick?)

Normally, I wouldn’t suggest that a production featuring bouts of (discreet) onstage surgery is a ripping and quicksilvery good time. But a sharp Moxie cast, some smartly calibrated plot revelations and plenty of good laughs make this show a remarkably lull-free zone.

Credit also the savvy direction of Moxie mainstay Jennifer Eve Thorn, who has staged the piece (which ran some three hours with two intermissions in its original 2011 Chicago production) as a two-acter running a positively zippy two hours and 30 minutes.

This is, somewhat amazingly, only the second full staging of “Hickorydickory,” which won the Chicago-based Wegrzyn the Wasserstein Prize (for young female playwrights) in 2009. But Moxie has championed her work like no other theater, with previous productions of “The Butcher of Baraboo” and “Ten Cent Night.”

The premise of “Hickorydickory” is a little like a “Twilight Zone” episode as imagined by the renegade director Terry Gilliam: Every person on Earth, the conceit goes, is embedded with an actual clock that determines how long he or she will live.

Most people have those “mortal clocks” tucked away behind the heart, undetected. But some, such as the melancholy high schooler Dale (Erin Peterson), are unlucky enough to have them ticking in their brains, like a time bomb.

Wegrzyn leads us to believe Dale and others not only can hear their clocks but can tell just by listening how much time they have left. How that works is not addressed any more clearly than the question of why doctors never seem to have noticed these little machines in their patients.

You can get hung up on such puzzles, or just chalk them up as in keeping with the playwright’s quirky universe, one in which the possession of profound knowledge has made the characters in some ways oddly blasé.

The important thing to know is that Samantha Ginn is giving one of the comic performances of the year as Cari Lee, Dale’s mother. The twist is, the character she plays is only 17; her clock has been stopped, part of a broader mystery that is teased out over the course of the story.

Ginn, who has been a rising talent in smaller roles with Moxie, Playwrights Project and Scripps Ranch Theatre (as well as a company member of Circle Circle Dot Dot), nails the part of this abrasive-but-caring eternal teen with a beautiful sense of timing and a dry wit that doesn’t blunt the impact of the play’s deeper focus on life’s fleeting nature.

Her four cast mates are all excellent in multiple roles: Besides Peterson, there’s John Anderson as (primarily) the clock-shop proprietor Jimmy, Justin Lang as the Irish shop worker Rowan, and Moxie co-founder Jo Anne Glover, who as Jimmy’s wife Kate has a knockout comic scene involving her prep for clock surgery.


