When people refer to New York as a city of 8 million, it can occasionally seem as if that number refers to the amount of active theater companies. They either prosper or they wither away, but there’s never a lack of young performers, writers and directors trying to make theater on their terms.

Last year, theater company Colt Coeur made its grand New York City debut with a well-publicized (and reviewed) bang: Seven Minutes in Heaven. A company comprised of theater professionals who gather together to do less financially motivated shows about the extraordinary ordinariness of young adulthood, Colt Coeur seemed to have hit a nerve. And just a year later, it’s back with a second full-length production, Lucas Kavner’s Fish Eye.

"We’re really focused on developing work as a company, from the early stages," says artistic director Adrienne Campbell-Holt. "I tend to bring an idea to a playwright or develop an idea and bring in actors early, before there are pages. And we use a lot of improv and personal experience in the creation of the text."

That approach was particularly potent with Fish Eye, which follows the crumbling of a relationship through a fractured chronology. "I’ve always wanted to do something about the last night of a really long relationship, where some big change is happening," says Kavner. " And I talked about it with Adrienne pretty early on, and got together with some actors and just sat in the room for a week. It started with just wanting to do the last night, but it’s not like you remember one blowout fight or one trip. You remember this weird amalgamation of stuff that’s piled up in your head."

Campbell-Holt agrees. "We wanted to try to create a piece that really used the ordinary moments in the relationship as the touchstone," she says. "And I was really excited about looking at it in a nonlinear way because I think memory is so subjective. The reordering that happens, especially as time goes by, is like these flashbulb memories. Where obviously the two people in the relationship were experiencing the same event, but they’ll recall it differently. And I feel like it makes the relationship more universal to see the pieces fragmented."

Though movies like Blue Valentine have ruthlessly exposed the terrible ordinariness of break-ups via scrambled time ("There are some similarities, but it’s a coincidence," Campbell-Holt, who is friends with Blue Valentine’s writerdirector Derek Cianfrance, says), there aren’t many—if any—plays that manage to avoid the big, explosive fireworks of two people drifting apart. And Kavner credits Campbell-Holt’s vision for this production.

"There’s something very inclusive about [Colt Coeur]," Kavner says. "As a young company, it’s not like risk is important as much as telling a story that people want to hear. It’s a very open place and I think that’s what she wants it to be, ideally, where a lot of different people can come."

As for Campbell-Holt, she just wants Colt Coeur to keep doing intimate shows with dazzling visuals. "I’m really excited about it becoming a company that has two to three productions a year, one to two of them being completely original and created by the company," she says. "I’m happy to get my paychecks from larger companies, and keep these shows small. I don’t think bigger is better. I think intimate is very, very special. There are some venues that I would love to do our shows in that are a little larger, but the focus is really on creating simple, ordinary stories that are highly design-driven but not all about lots of money." 

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Gigantic
Directed by Matt Aselton
Runtime: 98 min.

Any film that casts Zooey Deschanel as its female lead has already fulfilled its quota of quirkiness, but Gigantic insists on gilding the lily. With her huge, unblinking eyes and deadpan delivery, Deschanel has carved a cinematic niche for herself similar to Mary-Louise Parker’s; both women seem extraordinary when glimpsed in ordinary circumstances, turning everyday life into a place in which anything can happen, no matter how surreal.

But Matt Aselton’s Gigantic (which he co-wrote with Adam Nagata) doesn’t just stop with the presence of Deschanel as a woman named Harriet “Happy” Lolly. She’s merely the slightly dim love interest of Gigantic’s real focus, 28-year-old Brian (Paul Dano). A sweet-faced guy not terribly engaged in life, Brian works at a mattress store housed in a dingy warehouse in NYC, in between attempts to fulfill his lifelong dream of adopting a Chinese baby and dodging attempts on his life by a homeless man. With all this (and Deschanel, too), the movie threatens to drown under the weight of its own idiosyncrasies.

Not even Brian’s friends and family are allowed normalcy. One of his co-workers eats goat stew; Brian’s crass brother makes conversation with visiting businessmen while they’re being jerked off at a massage parlor. And when Happy’s father, the large, wealthy hypochondriac Al (John Goodman, having a ball in expensive clothes) stops by the store to buy a mattress and get in a few amusing digs about his gay assistant’s personal life, things only get weirder.

Aselton suffers from the same affliction Wes Anderson exhibits: He has buffed the eccentric details of his characters and his story to such a high sheen that they threaten to blind the audience. Is the Chinese baby a device to peel back the layers of Happy and Brian’s relationship, or an important aspect of who Brian? And why a Chinese baby? Likewise, does the presence of a murderous vagrant mean that Gigantic will eventually turn tragic to prove that anyone as selfless as Brian is will be punished by an unforgiving world?

Gigantic has plenty of questions, but answers are few and far between. Yet there’s still something compelling about watching such a talented cast (including Ed Asner and Jane Alexander as Brian’s elderly parents) navigate the choppy waters of Aselton’s world. Dano, in particular, is a winningly disengaged protagonist, and possibly the only actor working in film today who could out-deadpan Deschanel. Their scenes together have a low-key appeal, as they both battle it out to see who can best mock their emotional response to one another with the thickest veneer of irony. In the end, Gigantic’s title is a misnomer. There’s nothing larger-than-life about a film this obsessed with the minutiae of the determinedly eccentric.