Jack Finnegan describes his view from the train as “just the sort of scene that makes you wish you were a painter, and just tough enough a scene to make you realize why you’re not.” What Jack Finnegan doesn’t realize, or maybe he does, is that he is actually an accomplished painter. He paints more beautiful pictures with his words than any oil on canvas I have ever seen.
City Love Song is Jack Finnegan’s portrait of America as told through his own travel experiences through 24 cities, followed by an extended stay in the biggest city the U.S. has to offer: New York. On one hand, it’s just one man in a bare black box theater; on the other, it’s a cross-country journey without ever stepping foot in a train station.
Finnegan is charming, personable and engaging, welcoming the audience into his stories as friends. He has an innate and impressive understanding of language, using sounds, momentum and silence to form a masterpiece. His writing is pure poetry, accurately painting pictures of every city in ways so true and complete that you feel as if you are seeing the places and having these experiences yourself. You can feel Madison’s calm, Boston’s cobblestones underneath your feet, the rush of the Pacific Ocean at Stinson Beach, the power of the sports car driving through Los Angeles’s canyons.
Finnegan’s tour of the United States is amazingly beautiful. It evokes a sense of pride and patriotism based in purity—the beauty of the land, the personality and history of our unique cities, the endless characters spread across our massive country. America is not beautiful because of won battles or demonstrated power. It is beautiful as a community founded on shared hope, history and experience.
The second cycle, Finnegan’s vision of New York City, is “a symphony, wild, unconducted,” perfectly created for the city-dweller exploring the back streets and subways that give the city its heartbeat. The writing is full of observations and metaphors communicating truths that basic words can’t, truths that are so often over-looked in the average New Yorker’s rush.
This show must be seen. Everyone deserves a chance to allow Finnegan’s language to wash over them, sitting wide-eyed like a child at story-time, then to walk out into the city streets and experience the city in a new light.
City Love Song; Written and performed by Jack Finnegan; Directed by Tralen Doler; 59E59 Theaters
