The Amazing Tarquin moves gracefully around the empty Laurie Theater stage, reciting a soliloquy ridden with warnings to the audience about fate and chance. His eloquent voice booms throughout the theater, and though this narrator (Anthony Mark Stockard, GRAD) appears in only a few scenes of the play Things Beyond Our Control-staged this weekend by the Brandeis Theatre Company-he harvests the soul of the performance, as he philosophizes about how and why the events of life are beyond our control. At the heart of this drama is a terrible hit-and-run, involving a taxi driver named Richie (Robert Serrell, GRAD), his passenger Roberta (Sandha Khin '07) and Dewey (Matthew Crider, GRAD), a young bicycle rider injured during the accident. The story follows these characters and the people closest to them, and how their lives become entangled in the aftermath. Roberta, for example, feels horrible and spends the play searching for the bicyclist's identity, supported by her lover, Miranda (Quinn Rae Nathanson '06). Richie, meanwhile, shuts himself off from others, including his romantic interest Opal (Lindsay McWhorter, GRAD), as Doctor Stein (Eli Matzner '08) reaches out to Glen (Paul D. Farwell, Equity), father of the dying Dewey.

The play was written by Jesse Kellerman (MFA '03), and his intelligent script made the performance worth watching. While his keen use of words and tightly woven dialogue were accented by effective, dark humor, the actors did not always deliver the script with the energy it deserved. With few exceptions, the actors seemed non-committal about how to present each character. For example, even though Stockard delivered a captivating performance as The Amazing Tarquin, his character often arbitrarily changed from a cross between Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka portrayal and Edward Hyde, to an animated version of the wise Albus Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series.

A hotel room liaison between Roberta and Miranda was unconvincing; it was difficult to identify their feelings for each other due to abrupt emotional changes in their line deliveries. Most of the time, they portrayed a haphazard couple with no chemistry. But this depiction contrasted points in the story in which the women are forced to evaluate their "love" amid stressful situations. At one point, for instance, Miranda lies, confessing to being the driver who hit Dewey; only after this surprising development did the audience realize she truly loves Roberta, and is not just using her as an emotional crutch for loneliness.

The actors needed to portray their tangled love more consistently, through their presentation of dialogue and body language. These were not the only problems with the acting. Even though the play takes place in Dallas, some of the characters affected deep Southern drawls while others demonstrated no trace of an accent. And the two-and-a-half-hour production could have been shorter had the actors minimized silences between lines of dialogue. Such unnecessary pauses over-dramatized the exchanges, and the actors appeared to recite their lines later than reality might dictate.

Despite its problems, Things Beyond Our Control was far from dull. The construction of the plot was creative and entertaining, and The Amazing Tarquin's lines added thematic depth to the story. The production impressed with the strong story itself, if not with the choices of its characters.