con-con’s ‘Like I Say’ less than the sum of its peculiar parts Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, International Association of Theatre Critics Len Jenkin’s bizarre comedy “Like I Say” and its Ohio-premiere production at convergence-continuum has so much going for it. The playwright has long been a favorite on the off-off-Broadway circuit and a master of the theatrical avant-garde. Much like Mark Twain, he uses humor to explore the basic questions of human existence and, like Kurt Vonnegut, this exploration often takes place in desolate locations to see how humans fare under those peculiar conditions. “Like I Say,” first performed in 2003, takes place at the Hotel Splendide, a broken-down seaside resort that is described by its handful of itinerant and non-paying occupants as being on a “dark end of the street” at “the edge of the world.” Much of the play is spent revealing the rather mundane and fractured lives of the disenfranchised hotel manager Helena (Lauren B. Smith), her stuttering, lovelorn handyman Little Junior (August Scapelli), who has a crush on angst-filled guest Rose (Linda Sekanic), and an alcoholic artist named Mr. Schwartzberg (Robert Hawkes) who is painting the hotel’s garden walls with images of the dead dancing with the living, But Jenkin tends to explore often disparate layers of the human condition by having the world his characters inhabit morph into both whimsical and grotesque variations that twist and turn inside out, or which simply lapse into fantasy. The storytelling potential of all this dark whimsy and silliness is enormous and right in con-con’s wheelhouse, but this production stumbles and never hits its stride. For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.