"Do Not Do This Ever Again" is a 90-minute intermissionless journey into "a landscape of lost love and modern loneliness," though the multi-media'd journey feels so much longer because about halfway through writer Keithley and director Goyanes decided to drop humor and cheek and instead go portentious and sober. Broken into 3½ parts (the half-part is called "inter-part"), the talented eight-member crew of "Do Not..." drapes long swags of faux-meaningful text over the audience in order to decrease their oxygen supply and slip them into a hypnotic state where they will believe they are being shown something significant and insightful, when, in fact, they're only experiencing a low-grade delirium induced by the performance and a stuffy theatre. Keithley and Goyanes also cram in some projections, movement, and music (both instrumental and vocal -- Katy Pyle's voice is actually the best thing in the show), but very little of it adds yeast to the unleavened core of Keithley's play.
Michael Bettencourt
