Rochester Fringe Festival 2025
The Navel Gazers
Starr Street Productions
Genre: Theatre
Venue: The Rose Room
Festival: Rochester Fringe Festival
Low Down
Rote characters in a predictably dramatic world are given space to breathe and develop in this surprisingly sincere play.
Review
“Navel gazing” is defined as: self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view. The Navel Gazers, written by Jack Harding and performed by Starr Street Productions at Rochester’s The Rose Room, was aptly named. I was relieved that the creators of the piece were self aware enough to know and even satirize the myopic viewpoints that so many twenty-somethings dramas fall into through the telling of this story. Even so, I was wary that self-awareness could only take my interest so far if the content wasn’t engaging in more than just over dramatic, self-involved characters wallowing in personal problems as relevant as those featured in Dawson’s Creek (or any other tween soapy drama).
I was immediately engaged, however, watching the actors dance through the dialogue with nuance, closer to film acting than your typical theatre style, ala over projecting, exaggerated hand gestures and physicality. The timing and value they gave to the script was genuinely impressive to watch. One significant downside to that aspect, however, is that there were several times I lost dialogue in key moments because I couldn’t hear or understand what the actors were saying.
The story follows Anna and Olivia, roommates, and Anna’s boyfriend. The character of Anna as the sweet, ultra sincere, and generally faultless young woman fills the ingénue role; Olivia is a bit more character as the abrasive, loud, aggressively self-centered but no less loving best friend; Anna’s boyfriend rounds out the types as the well-meaning, genuine, and ultimately naïve man. As I said, the play was aptly named, and they filled the stereotypical roles for this genre of story with the appropriate characters. The story begins by showing us that Olivia is viciously insecure of her relevance in Anna’s life (or anyone else’s) which leads her to act out of jealousy and impulsivity, Anna is the center of love from both Olivia and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend is struggling to find his direction education/career-wise and move his relationship with Anna forward. There was nothing unique about the plot or characters, which had me doubting for a while whether rehashing another story of twenty somethings finding their way in the world worth exploring yet again.
The Naval Gazers rewards its audience, however, in allowing the characters to develop in unexpected ways. In allowing the play to end without its original leading lady. In letting the remaining characters sit honestly in their uncertainty and with subtlety, without the bravado that the play opened and climaxed with. The result was an ultimate feeling of sincerity, and connectivity with the audience, with the rest of the world and with all of us, who are all just trying to find our ways through our own stories.
