When Palm Coast actor-comedian Danno Waddell officiated a friend’s wedding in 2023, he spoke part of the service in Unamunda.
Una-what?
Turns out Waddell is arguably one of the world’s top two experts in Unamunda, an obscure tongue that once had aspirations of becoming a universal language. Waddell modestly says he speaks Unamunda “fluently,” and he confesses that he sometimes dreams in Unamunda.
The world’s other leading expert in Unamunda? That would be playwright David Ives, who created the fictious tongue for his one-act play “The Universal Language,” which premiered Off-Broadway in 1993 as part of the Ives one-act collection “All in the Timing.”
City Repertory Theatre is concluding its 2025-2026 season by staging two works from “All in the Timing” – “The Universal Language” and “Sure Thing” – along with “Line,” a 1967 one-act by Israel Horovitz. The trio of absurdist comedies opens Friday, April 24 and plays at various times through Sunday, May 3, at City Rep’s black box theater in Palm Coast’s City Marketplace.
For this season, CRT’s 15th, the community theater is reprising plays from its past. City Rep first staged “Line” during its second season, and it staged “All in the Timing” in 2021.
“The Universal Language” tells the story of Dawn, a young woman (played by Jen Chidekel) who decides to take Unamunda lessons from Don (Waddell), hoping it will help with her stuttering.
Director Beau Wade says Ives “wanted to write a musical in a different language, but that wasn’t really working and he landed on the fact that the new language was the music – he didn’t need to increase it by making it actually songs. He was like, ‘Let me just make the language musical itself.’ ”
Wade notes the universality of human experiences and adds that “no matter what religion, culture or whatever you believe in, ultimately we all come from the same space. From my perspective, it’s a show about how do we connect with each other in, like they say, a universal language. This is two people coming together to find each other when normally that wouldn’t happen in another circumstance.”
Christopher Nelson, who performs in “Line,” says that the “musical aspect” of “The Universal Language” “actually changed a little bit of how I saw the play, because it’s not the language that connects the two – it’s the musicality of it. What they’re actually saying is irrelevant. The music of it allows her to communicate with somebody, and it changes his perspective on life too.”
As for Unamunda’s role in Waddell’s turn as a wedding officiant: That happened in 2023 at the marriage of his friend Anna Hobbs to Brendan Burns. Hobbs played opposite Waddell in CRT’s 2021 production of “The Universal Language.”
The bride and groom “gave me full license to do what I wanted,” Waddell says. “So I started off the ceremony in Unamunda. It was a nice little sort of friendly callback. I didn’t do the whole ceremony in Unamunda because all the guests, I’m sure, wanted to know what I was saying.”
Those curious guests, and patrons of CRT’s night of one-acts, can learn Unamunda here. But such seekers should pay heed to Waddell: Ives’s alternative language, he says, “does invade your brain.”
The absurdist comedy doesn’t let up in the other two one-acts on CRT’s bill.
“Sure Thing” explores the story of a man and woman who meet for the first time in a café, and the different ways a love connection can flourish or flounder. The absurdist twist: Each time one says something that derails the other’s interest, a bell rings and the scenario is reset, giving the couple a new chance at romance.
CRT is once again adding its own twist: During the troupe’s 2021 production, the characters Bill and Betty were each played by four actors. This time out, City Rep is using three couples, with Betty portrayed by Phillipa Rose, Jen Chidekel and April Whaley, and Bill played by Waddell, Beau Wade and Xavier Torres, with Christopher Nelson as the bell ringer. The director is CRT co-founder John Sbordone.
“The play talks about how there are different universal truths in each life and how those can be interpreted by different people, or the same person in a myriad of ways,” Wade says. With three couples portraying the same couple at different moments, “We can see all the different varieties that could come about. They’re all on stage at the same time but not always lit at the same time. You get the sense that it’s one universe but there are so many different layers.”
Israel Horovitz’s “Line” – his first produced play, which debuted in 1967 – explores the behaviors and perspectives of five people waiting in a line, and their attempts to jockey themselves into the first spot. A 1974 revival of “Line” became the longest-running Off-Off-Broadway show ever, playing continuously at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre from 1974 to 2018.
The CRT cast includes Christopher Nelson as Fleming, a baseball fan; Beau Wade as Stephen, a Mozart aficionado prone to verbosity; Phillipa Rose as Molly, a voluptuous woman who doesn’t hesitate to unleash her feminine wiles; Xavier Torres as Dolan, a philosopher who proffers his “Underdog Theory”; and Waddell as Arnall, Molly’s timid, cuckolded husband.
While waiting in line is one of life’s mundane commonalities, director Sbordone is quick to point out the absurdist elements that Horovitz grafts onto the situation.
“What are they in line for?” Sbordone posits. (The play never explicitly reveals the reason, although several characters provide contradictory hints.) “Why do they need to be first? What are they willing to do to get to first? How does this reflect human nature, or is it just a piece of theater? The most interesting thing about it all is this line is in the middle of nowhere.”
Sbordone further examines the Horovitz one-act in his director’s note for the playbill: “There is something compelling about the human need to be first. Horovitz explores the physical, emotional and spiritual motives behind that inherent compulsion. He magnifies the desire to supersede each other as the characters use cleverness and guile, brutality and sexuality to achieve the top of the line, the best in show, the pinnacle of success that seems inherent in our culture. And he makes us laugh.”
“If you take away the concept of the line, the play is more about your position in life, how you’re constantly vying for a non-existent endpoint,” Nelson says. “Everybody has a goal, something they want to do. They want to get farther in life, and how far will they go to get it? The line just represents what society tells you that you have to do in order to get to that point. I have to get a bigger house, I have to get a bigger car than my friend – these are the metaphorical lines that we’re all trying to strive toward. We can work together and we can all succeed, but we’re constantly fighting each other and losing our position and losing what we’re trying to get.”
Torres notes that “One of the absurd things I find is the power dynamics of the play – the way they shift completely, almost every other moment. Each character has their own moment of power, and then they could lose it just as quickly the next moment.”
As for his character Arnall, Waddell says: “Every time I gloat about where I am in line, I’m basically second to last – I’m just happy I’m not last.”
–Rick de Yampert for FlaglerLive
City Repertory Theatre will stage David Ives’s “All in the Timing” (which includes the one-acts “Sure Thing” and “Universal Language”) and Israel Horovitz’s “Line” at 7:30 p.m. April 24-25 and May 1-2, and at 3 p.m. April 26 and May 3. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $25 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time.
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