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Theater Theater Feature

I’ll Melt With You

The sexually oppressed, nuclear-death-obsessed 1950s spawned countless bubblegum odes to forbidden love, teen angst, and horrible, horrible death. Morose romanticism ruled the jukebox, and lyrics like “I couldn’t stop, so I swerved to the right. I’ll never forget the sound that night. The cryin’ tires, the bustin’ glass. The painful scream that I heard last” (from “Last Kiss”) or “As they pulled him from the twisted wreck, with his dying breath they heard him say, ‘Tell Laura I love her'” (from “Tell Laura I Love Her”) filled the airwaves. If you can imagine the dreams of a young couple drifting off to sleep at the drive-in while a teenaged werewolf howls from the giant silver screen and one of these sad and sappy songs plays on a tinny AM radio, then you can easily imagine Circuit Playhouse’s production of Zombie Prom. It’s a giddy, kitschy ode to all things retro and radioactive.

Director Michael Duggan has turned Zombie Prom into an exercise in glorious excess. There is so much going on at any one time there is no way to catch it all. The show begins, for all practical purposes, in the lobby shortly after patrons pick up their tickets and walk through a silver tinsel curtain into a nattily decorated ball room. Shimmering foil letters welcome the audience to a magical “evening of miracles and molecules.” Patrons are then met, inspected, and fumigated by ominous silent ushers in bulky white radiation suits before they are admitted into the auditorium. The silly device is old hat to be sure and almost a direct rip-off of the original London production of The Rocky Horror Show, but it fits Zombie Prom like a blue rubber glove.

I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away by revealing a bit of the storyline. It is, after all, an old, time-honored plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy jumps into a nuclear reactor and becomes a glowing, green-eyed zombie who just wants to get his diploma, marry his girlfriend, and live happily ever after. Toss in a stern high school principal to provide just a modicum of prefabricated conflict and a sleazy tabloid journalist with a big last-minute secret to reveal, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. The pace is breakneck and the songs are clever and catchy. In a time when cumbersome, self-important operas have come to dominate the stage, this retro rocket from the crypt is a real blast of fresh air.

Dan Gingert starts out a bit awkwardly as Jonny, a leather-jacket-sporting greaser so rebellious that he even removed the “h” from his name. He shuffles around the stage like he would rather be somewhere else, striking tentative poses which scream out, “Gotta-go-baffroom.” But the knock-kneed navel-gazing ends once Jonny becomes zombified. Gingert quite literally comes alive and exudes unimaginable sweetness while he rocks the house.

With her pretty pouting and squeaky but irresistible voice, Courtney Ell is nothing short of stunning as the lovestruck Toffee. She delivers even her most ludicrous lines with sincerity and supreme conviction. Her song, “Jonny, Don’t Go to the Nuclear Plant,” is so energetic and engaging that it’s next to impossible not to sing along at the top of your lungs. Resist the urge though. You won’t want to miss a single syllable. Neither will you want to miss the synchronized antics of the chorus as they dance about in safety goggles and lab coats providing perfect three-point harmony.

Sally Kroeker’s Principal Strict is perfection in a hobble-skirt. Stomping about with her metal ruler in hand and a mouthful of platitudes, she is every student’s nightmare. On the other hand, there is something mighty sexy about discipline, and the vertically blessed Ms. Kroeker seems to know it. An intensely comic seduction scene between Principal Strict and scandal-sheet editor Eddie Flagrante (played to the seedy teeth by Kent Fleshman) appears to be the most fun two actors have ever had on any stage, anywhere, at any time. And the fun is infectious.

I would be remiss not to single out and praise Rebecca Sederbaum, Raine Hicks, Kayce Matthews, Arlyn Mick, Jordan Nichols, and Cary Vaughn, who play the students at Enrico Fermi High. This chorus never fades into the background, and thanks to Michael Duggan’s supersized direction and Jay Rapp’s stellar choreography, every performer has his or her scenery-chewing moment in the spotlight.

Zombie Prom isn’t particularly original. Off-kilter musical comedies sending up 1950s-style drive-in horror movies became rather commonplace in the latter half of the 20th century. Richard O’Brien’s glammed-out, deliciously perverse Rocky Horror Show started it all back in 1973, and the subtler, but no less perverse Little Shop of Horrors made its bloody, musical mark in the ’80s. While it is not nearly as subversive as its aforementioned predecessors, Zombie Prom is no less destined for, or deserving of, cult status.

Through June 17th

Ho, Ho, Horrorshow

I know it’s not the critic’s place to solicit funding, but somebody really does need to give Our Own Voice Theatre Company a lot of money so they can afford to run their shows for at least a month. One weekend just isn’t enough time for them to build the regular audience they deserve. It’s frustrating for a critic to sit down and write a glowing review of a show that has already ended, especially when it’s a show he knows nobody saw. But such is life for this ephemeral troupe, which has too often been pigeonholed as nothing more than an outlet for the mentally disadvantaged.

Against all odds, this group, which is made up of a fistful of local theater artists working hand in hand with mental-healthcare consumers, continues to produce the most challenging, innovative theater in Memphis. I’d go so far as to say they might be the most interesting performance troupe in the South, and on a good day I’d even say they were the most consistently surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking group working outside of Chicago. What they lack in terms of spit and polish is more than compensated for in cleverness and raw courage.

Our Own Voice recently staged Spurt of Blood, the seminal, if never-performed, prototype for Antonin Artaud’s often misunderstood Theatre of Cruelty. Those who missed it missed not the best but certainly the most exciting theatrical event of the year. Using puppets ranging in size from the standard sock to colossal cardboard constructions with exploding breasts, bits of rubble, broken toys, and scrap fabric, Our Own Voice served up a very funny, sometimes startling visual feast. They successfully presented the collision of stars, battles in the heavens, full-scale apocalypse, armies of cockroaches, and a sweet teenage tale of forbidden love to boot. Brilliant and beautiful, hysterical and unnerving, Spurt of Blood was everything it needed to be and more. E.E. Cummings’ Santa Claus, with Bill Baker as Death and Andy Diggs as a somewhat serious incarnation of that jolly fat elf, made a fine companion piece for Spurt of Blood. This overwrought bit of surrealist drama was like a nightmarish Warner Bros. cartoon before the most whacked-out feature you can imagine.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Catawampus

I wouldn’t help but overhear an elderly lady seated behind me, since she
was forcefully projecting her full, drawling baritone with more gusto than
your average actor. “It must mean something,” she declared with
winsome disdain and fragile finality, adding, “I hope I get it.”

The woman and her friend were discussing the slickly designed
deco set for Playhouse on the Square’s odd, off-kilter take on Hay
Fever
. Noel Coward must have been busting a gut in his grave since his
superficial-by-design peanut-butter parfait of a play is anything but
meaningful. As Sorrel, the bratty young bohemian, says somewhere in Act Two,
“We don’t, any of us, ever mean anything.” But you can’t really
fault the lady for assuming that any set which calls as much attention to
itself as this one does must contain some sort of hidden message. The colorful
and finely executed backdrop catches the eye but not the imagination, and the
chunky furnishings and odd but innocuous objects of art fade into the
woodwork. The smart, white deco screens that make up the set’s walls are dandy
indeed, each crowned with a green dot the exact color and shape of a dried
wasabi pea. But even as attractive as they are, they aren’t worth wondering
over for very long. What sets this extra-artificial environment apart is that
the stage is built on a ridiculously steep angle. It’s more like a skateboard
ramp than a stage. The furnishings — sofa, chairs, and baby grand, each
shimmed up to square with a pile of books — all stay put, it seems, out of
sheer force of will. It is a world fallen horribly out of balance and perhaps
more appropriate for bringing to life the absurd imaginings of Eugene Ionesco
than those of the merely whimsical Coward. Above all, it appears to be deeply
meaningful, and yet it is not. It is the principal sight gag in the giddy
parade of sight gags which make up this hammy, fast-paced, and generally
delightful production.

Hay Fever‘s premise is so sketchy one would swear it had
been written by committee, though the script does gain a bit of complexity by
the sheer lengths to which its already thin plot is stretched. Each of the
four egomaniacal members of the Bliss household has, unbeknownst to the other,
invited a potential romantic interest to come and stay for the weekend. Once
the guests arrive, the various family members, who delight in the sheer
meanness of playing overly theatrical head games, begin a process of wooing
that might very well be considered harassment by modern standards. And then
they all switch partners and woo some more until the guests have no choice but
to run for their lives. No doubt the revelers from Richard O’Brien’s Rocky
Horror Show
, as perverse and extreme as they are, take their cues from
Coward’s Bliss family, which at times appears to be from another (sexually
dysfunctional) planet.

Ann Marie Hall plays Judith Bliss, the aging actress, earth
mother, and flirty-now/icy-later seductress-like a woman who really, really,
really wants to thank the academy. No gag spared, no scenery left unchewed.
Though she is perhaps overshadowed by the set and certainly informed by Carol
Burnett’s Nora Desmond, Bliss is Hall’s most boldly drawn character since
As Bees in Honey Drown, and except for a few strained moments it is an
absolute delight.

Guy Oliveri, as Simon Bliss, scampers about the stage like a
helium-filled gibbon. Gravity is meaningless, and his use of furniture in lieu
of stairs gives the play an edgy Escher-like vibe. Nora Ottley Stillman is a
bit more commonplace but no less effective as Simon’s sister Sorel. While Dave
Landis’ take on the family patriarch is loud and less nuanced than it could be
he gets the job done well, and the stylized posturing of Renee Davis as vapid
flapper Jackie Coryton strikes a perfect balance between overacting and
understatement. It’s as if she is constantly posing to have her portrait
painted on a cola tin. As Carla, the dresser turned housekeeper, Karin Hill
comes off like a limey Ann B. Davis.

The costumes are all garish takes on flapper-era chic and
painstakingly detailed. Kim Justice, as Myra, who may be the closest thing the
play has to a conscience, is so done up in spangles and spit-curls she looks
as if she might shatter like an antique porcelain doll if you even looked at
her harshly. It makes her foot-stomping tantrums that much more
satisfying.

Director John Fagan has created giddy choreography for every
moment of Hay Fever and set a breakneck tempo for the show. It’s the
kind of relentless romp you seldom see anywhere other than in a Marx Brothers
film, and it’s tasty. But a jot less whimsy and a little more work on
establishing relationships could have made it even better. n

Hay Fever at Playhouse on the Square through May 20th.

Diary Of a Madman

When Spurt of Blood opens at TheatreWorks on a double bill
with E.E. Cummings’ Santa Claus Friday, May 11th, Memphians will have
an incredibly rare opportunity to see a work by the 20th century’s most
significant yet least performed dramatic artist. Plagued by mental illness,
poet, playwright, and theorist Antonin Artaud spent his entire life in and out
of asylums. It is only fitting that Our Own Voice Theatre Company, an
organization dedicated to the creation and performance of original dramatic
material by mental health-care consumers, would choose to mount Spurt of
Blood
, Artaud’s seemingly unstageable combination of ritual and
poetry.

Over the past decade, this ridiculously unappreciated group has,
under the guiding hand of artistic director Bill Baker, applied the thinking
of progressive theorists like Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal to create
original works such as the screamingly funny send-up of the local theater
community Ephemera, the bizarre yet poignant This Is Not An
Outlet
, and the only rock opera in existence that really rocks
Supergroups A+. In short (and in spite of the group’s perennial lack of
trained actors), Our Own Voice makes the most consistently innovative,
interesting, and complex theater in Memphis.

The foundations of Artaud’s theories are really quite simple, if,
in the end, their application seems close to impossible. “It has not been
definitively proved,” he wrote in his book The Theatre and its
Double
, “that the language of words is the best possible language.
And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place
where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a
language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most
immediate impact on us.” The goal was to create “a directly
communicative language”: aural and visual pheromones, if you will. He
believed that the world was diseased and, as a result, humanity was diseased.
His Theatre of Cruelty, which is not so much cruel as it is jarring to the
senses, is, holistically speaking, the great panacea. Informed by the art of
the Mannerists, who often lumped dozens of disparate subjects and actions into
their intensely symbolic paintings, Artaud’s vision for the theater was not
entirely unlike hypnotism. It was designed to possess the audience and control
them utterly — but for their own good. This aspect of Artaud’s work led
British innovator and one-time Artaudian advocate Peter Brook to claim that
the Theatre of Cruelty was, at its core, flawed by fascism. By Brook’s
achingly liberal definition, a roller-coaster ride would likewise be a fascist
event.

Santa Claus (Spurt of Blood) at TheatreWorks May 11th-
13th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Inklings

“It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition of both truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.”

— C.S. Lewis

The great Christian apologist and noted fantasy writer Clive Staples Lewis was certainly no stranger to the concept of death. When he was only 8 years old he lost his mother to cancer. Within a year he would also lose his uncle and his grandfather. As an officer in the British infantry during WWI he watched his fellow soldiers go down in the heat of battle, a best friend and former roommate among them.

It’s not at all surprising, given his lifelong proximity to death, that the theme of resurrection is so abundant in Lewis’ fiction. In fact, The Magician’s Nephew is, in the most metaphoric sense possible, an autobiography of the writer’s secret soul. It tells the story of a young man who journeys into a magical kingdom hoping to find a golden apple that will save his dying mother. No doubt, Lewis wished he could have somehow gone back in time and done the same. The Magician’s Nephew also tells the story of how Narnia, Lewis’ fantastical country filled with elves, sprites, talking lions, and deep magic, was created. Shadowlands, which plays at Germantown Community Theatre through May 6th, shows how in real life Lewis created his own, less exciting world in order to avoid the perils of emotional attachment. It focuses on Lewis’ strange love affair with American divorcée Joy Davidman, who died of bone cancer only three years after their secret marriage. It is a simple, straightforward play entirely bereft of razzmatazz. And yet, in its own unassuming way, it’s as moving a piece of theater as you are likely to find.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the Narnia series, a group of children discover an alternate universe while playing a game of hide-and-seek. In Shadowlands, Lewis, an avowed bachelor, discovers that he has been playing this same game for the better part of his life. He has cloistered himself in a world of literature and religious academia, allowing himself only the company of the curmudgeonly “Inklings,” a group of fellow wits who took as much pleasure in debating theology as they did in swilling beer and telling naughty stories. All the while, Lewis, using intellect alone, has been seeking the love of an elusive and seemingly capricious God. When a bright, attractive, and down-on-her-luck American divorcée stumbles into his life, Lewis, against his better judgment, experiences something of an emotional resurrection.

Though he was born in Belfast, Ireland, C.S. Lewis was almost a caricature of the stodgy comfort-seeking British intellectual. His long-toothed “hrum-hrooming” speech was so very distinctive that friend and fellow fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien adopted it for the character of Treebeard in his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. Former GCT executive director Keith Salter, who plays Lewis in Germantown’s Shadowlands, makes no attempt to mimic his character’s famed vocal tics. In fact, he makes no effort whatsoever to even do a British dialect. And that’s more than likely a good thing. Dialects can be tricky, and a poorly executed accent is a terrible distraction for the audience. It’s far better to focus on honesty and intent. Wisely, Jack Kendall, who plays Lewis’ brother Warnie, does the same. Unfortunately, many of the remaining cast members have not followed Salter’s lead and have chosen to use a British accent. Even if they were proficient in this, which they are not, it would create problems with continuity within the play. As it stands, those who insist on using the sloppy dialects which don’t sound like any language spoken on the planet Earth, significantly diminish the efforts of their fellow actors and the effects of an otherwise solid production.

Salter is positively charming as Lewis. He finds a great deal of humanity and almost as much humor in his character’s utter emotional ineptitude. The anger he expresses toward a God he loves and trusts but cannot begin to understand manifests itself like a swift kick in the groin. Salter is careful not to ever allow his Lewis to become too anti-God. Though he may have been flummoxed by the Almighty’s mysterious movings, and though the script suggests that God is, perhaps, an enemy to man, the Christian writer’s faith never once faltered. Rightly, Salter’s most furiously delivered lines, which are taken almost directly from an essay titled Grief Observed, are at most the complaints of a child who cannot understand his parents’ punishments. Tracie Hansom is no less moving as Lewis’ beloved wife Joy. She is heart-breakingly understated in a role that could just as easily have been rendered as an overwrought pity party. The genuine surprise she expresses when she discovers that she can hold her own among England’s more caustic wits is priceless, and when the character grows ill, the actress chooses to display strength over frailty.

Director Joey Watson has done a fine job steering his actors through an extremely delicate script. It’s too bad he couldn’t get his actors to all speak the same language.

Shawdowlands at the Germantown Community Theatre through May 6th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Camelot and Other Fairy Stories

No one has done more to show how Americans have fetishized the Kennedy administration than a British author named J.G. Ballard. In his short rant, A Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Seen as an Uphill Bicycle Race, he had the audacity to claim that men get tremendous erections while viewing photographs of the car Kennedy was riding in when a bullet tore through his head. He created a not-so-fictional world of media saturation where the rising and falling of Jackie-O’s hemline could drastically affect international markets. Using the blackest of black humor Ballard held a mirror up to one of our most sacred national obsessions, showing us the horrible psychological scars we suffered when Camelot exploded in front of our very eyes.

After Ballard was through there was little left to say about this particular phenomenon. Then along comes House of Yes, an odd little play that was turned into an equally odd little film starring Parker Posey and Genevieve Bujold. In a number of ways, House of Yes picked up where Plan for the Assassination left off by showing us a family that embodied many aspects of Ballard’s dark diatribe. Though House of Yes employs a decidedly Hitchcockian brand of suspense, it is, at heart, a sex farce. While the film has a lot to recommend it, the play is fraught with problems, and though Theatre Memphis’ production is an admirable one, it can’t entirely overcome the fact that when the play turns serious it becomes unduly repetitive, the dialogue disintegrates, and the narrative all but disappears. In fact, if House of Yes starred Andrew Stevens and featured a few bare boobs, it might pass for a live version of the kind of erotic thriller you can find on Skin-o-max every Friday night. It has the appearance of substance, but it’s really just a dirty joke. Not a bad dirty joke, mind you, but a dirty joke nonetheless.

Outside the Pascal home a hurricane is blowing. The world is being turned topsy-turvy by an awesome force of nature. Inside the Pascal home another no less awesome force of nature, Jackie-O, called so because of her fascination with the storied first lady, anxiously awaits her twin brother Marty’s arrival. When Marty arrives with his new fiancée in tow it is Jackie-O and not the hurricane who begins to blow the house down. You see, Jackie-O and Marty like to do it. They like to do it weird. Jackie dresses up like Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a smart pink suit and a pillbox hat. They re-enact the assassination (without once mentioning a grassy knoll, thank heavens) and then they get busy. Marty wants to end this unnatural affair, but Jackie- O isn’t about to let that happen. She’s had a history of mental illness and she’s ready to kill if she has to. From the onset it looks like she has to.

The entire Pascal household appears to be possessed of an off-kilter sexual permissiveness that may or may not reference the pre-AIDS sexual revolution that Aquarians are so fond of bragging about. Mrs. Pascal (dryly, sometimes wonderfully, played by Louise Levin), an encyclopedia of acerbic one-liners, claims not to truly know who fathered her children. Anthony Pascal, Marty and Jackie-O’s sweet but somewhat dim younger brother, is obsessed by the idea of sex with Marty’s fiancée Lesly. While reluctant to give in to his seemingly stunted desires, Lesly, a plain and simple girl who works in a donut shop, finds it difficult to say no to the boy. It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as only the Marquis de Sade might imagine it, and Puck’s magic ointment has been replaced by the precious blood of JFK.

Director Ed Tatum has done a fine job building the suspense, but the show gathers very little momentum as it creeps toward its obvious and unsatisfactory conclusion. This is largely because each cast member employs a different acting style. Levin and Jesse Klenk (Marty) take a stiff, somewhat formalized approach to their work with decidedly Stepfordian results. For this to work, everyone else would have to be doing the exact same thing and the pace would have to quicken. Unfortunately, and in spite of the fact that they are doing good, Levin and Klenk seem disconnected from everyone else in the play. Kyle Barnette (Anthony), who is rapidly becoming my favorite actor in town, and Laura Anne Otts (Lesly) take a simpler, more realistic approach to their roles, but in the end they too seem disconnected. Jenny Hollingsworth, who has proven her skill and range time and time again, falls a bit short of the mark as Jackie-O. Hers is a grating two-note performance with lots of smirking and eyebrow-lifting. The urge to play stark raving crazy has superseded the fact that Jackie-O’s condition stems from what are, to her, very real needs. She misses every opportunity for subtlety and slyness and overindulges in loud caustic bitchery.

A wonderfully executed set by T. Reid Parker sets the perfect tone for House of Yes. A black and blue checkerboard floor is flanked by two vaguely Asian door frames that have been given a Caligariesque slant. A revolve makes set changes fast and painless. It’s too bad that the suspended round window frames weren’t better used. If they had been positioned and lit a little more carefully, a shadow resembling a rifle’s crosshairs might have fallen on the area where the characters make their illicit hay, adding to the show’s expressionistic feel.

House of Yes is at the Little Theatre, Theatre Memphis through April 15th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Three-way

A.R. Gurney (Love Letters) is the dramatic voice of the tragically white. With lean prose tossed off as effortlessly as Bing Crosby’s celebrated scat, he speaks both for and to an imagined country-club set for whom a delayed tee-time might generate just enough conflict to fuel a rather laid-back Greek tragedy. Over the years, he has gently teased his well-heeled peer group, but Gurney’s light satire can seldom overcome the accompanying “conservatives are people, too” sentiments that permeate his work. In The Official Preppy Handbook, author Lisa Birnbach described ennui as a sort of affected boredom that makes every activity a person performs seem excruciatingly casual. It was a quality she highly recommended to would-be preps and a quality which Gurney’s characters exhibit in abundance. It is the very same characteristic that makes this white-bread historian’s latest offering, Far East, a bit of a snoozer. The characters come off as emotionally disengaged tourists gliding effortlessly through life. Their problems don’t bother them very much, so why should we care? Fortunately, Theatre Memphis’ production has a top-drawer cast, elegant direction by Jerry Chipman, and an absolutely breathtaking set by Michael Walker to recommend it. Even with all this exquisite baggage it comes off as the unfunny fulfillment of every WASP joke ever written.

Q: What’s an American WASP’s idea of open-mindedness?

A: Dating a Canadian.

Far East, which is set during a lull in the Korean War, begins when junior officer “Sparky” Watts (John Moore) reports for duty. He is an upbeat go-getter who, having been sheltered all his life by a wealthy family, is determined to find “meaningful experiences” overseas. While he pays lip-service to the virtues of being a good soldier, he is given to distraction and intent on preserving a luxurious, carefree lifestyle. He regularly requests leaves, plays lots of tennis, and has his very own convertible shipped over from America. Ironically, his rebellious playboy attitude is tempered by a WASPy urge to couple, and within days of his arrival he settles into a monogamous, loving relationship with a Japanese waitress whom the audience is never really allowed to meet. All of the play’s conflict is rooted around this one underwhelming transgression.

Enter Julia Anderson (Irene Crist Flanagan), the bored “Laura Bush meets Mrs. Robinson” wife of Sparky’s C.O. She is a “Smith girl” of the highest breeding. She knows young Sparky’s family and suspects that they would be devastated if they found out about his amorous adventures with a yellow-skinned heathen. So, of course, she devastates them. Later we discover (gasp!) that her actions are not motivated by breeding but rather a longing to breed with poor Sparky.

Moore, in his most animated role to date, makes Sparky a really likable guy. In fact, he’s so very nice and even-keeled that his excessive yet disarmingly understated affability seems more like some dangerous pathological disorder. The love he professes for his Japanese sweetheart is discussed with roughly the same ardor as his tennis game or his longing to climb Mt. Fuji. With a little more bravado and a little less spit and polish, Moore could have shown us what a greedy, manipulative, and immature opportunist Sparky really is — especially when he turns in his friend for being a homosexual who has swapped top-secret information to the enemy to avoid being outed. It’s a passionless career move and not at all an act of patriotism. As it stands, Moore comes off as a tepid, vaguely tragic romantic lead.

Flanagan’s patrician bearing and preening, motherly concern for Sparky never mask her character’s motives. She drips with sexual innuendo from their first awkward encounter. Her best moments, however, come near the end of the play when Sparky tells her that the simmering attraction she feels is mutual. Like a good little WASP, she takes this affirmation as a sign that this affair was never meant to be, leaving the entire audience with a painful case of theatrical blue balls.

Q: How many WASPs does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Three. Two to mix the martinis and one to call the electrician.

Barclay Roberts (in the role of Captain James Anderson) is virtually incapable of giving a bad performance. He’s always going to play essentially the same character, but not to worry: He’s very good at it. Every choice he makes is simple and every word rings true. And while this is no less the case in Far East, Roberts’ intrinsic warmth and gentleness ultimately undermine his performance and dull his self-absorbed character’s edge. On one hand, the career officer is infuriated by Sparky’s lack of seriousness and patriotism. On the other, he sees the young officer’s roguishness as a reflection of himself in younger, wilder days. Roberts glosses over this dilemma with an adorably gruff “what the hell, I like ya, kid” attitude. He’s so likable in fact that we forget that he virtually ignores his wife. When she eventually leaves him, it seems like an unfair and intentionally hurtful decision on her behalf rather than the result of their mutual unhappiness.

Captain Anderson sees the military as a sort of boy’s club where rank has its privileges. He’s more concerned with getting stationed on an aircraft carrier, improving his golf swing, and getting a little bit of indigenous tail from time to time than he is with salvaging his marriage. But in Roberts’ super-friendly hands, these less-than-sterling qualities become attractive signifiers of the rugged individualist. You just can’t find fault in a man you’d desperately like to sit down and have a drink with.

Q: Why did the WASP cross the street?

A: To get to the middle of the road.

Director Jerry Chipman deserves big props for dishing out the eye candy. The set, a single wooden tower set against a pale blue scrim and a burning orange sun, begs for crisp, uncluttered blocking. That is exactly what Chipman delivers. The entire experience of Far East is so enjoyable on a sheerly visual level it almost makes up for the lackluster script and the less-than-impassioned performances.

Far East at Theatre Memphis through March 25th.

Who Am I?

With the opening of Bizet’s Locket, Playwright’s Forum, a company dedicated solely to the development of original scripts, has launched its finest effort this season. The story follows Annette, a young woman of the ’60s who has returned to France to track down her birth parents. She enlists the aid of Pierre, a dubious war-hero-turned-cop who helped her adoptive parents smuggle her out of Europe during WWII and now seems to go out of his way to throw Annette off the scent.

The subtle, talky script is perhaps a bit too pat. Characters draw conclusions too quickly, and the mystery is not terribly compelling. Still, it is compelling enough, and the question of whether or not Pierre is actually a murderous, in-the-closet Nazi provides plenty of intrigue.

An all-star cast, featuring the talents of Tony Isbell, Michele C. Summers, and Dorothy Blackwood, gives the script the kind of intelligent workout that a new work not only deserves but requires. Leigh Ann Evans’ direction is, for the most part, on the money. Long, tedious, and often unnecessary set-changes, which make Bizet’s Locket move just a little slower than an elderly slug on Quaaludes, should be sped up or eliminated. Either one would be a radical improvement.

Bizet’s Locket at TheatreWorks through March 10th.

Art Attack

The U of M’s entire studio theater space has been converted into a warm, cozy art gallery. Light-pedestals scattered throughout the audience hold objects both mundane and fascinating. Similar pedestals onstage display trophies, kettles, and books. Everything about the environment is inviting and comfortable, until the lights dim, that is, and we meet the characters in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen.

Jonathan Waxman is a wildly successful Jewish artist who constantly poor-mouths his achievements and bad-mouths an art world that embraced him and made him a star. He is an insufferable egomaniac who believes in his own myth, if for no other reason because he made it himself — with the help of a publicist, of course. His “bad boy” art, which has undertones of racism, blends religious symbology with scenes of graphic sex and (quite possibly) violence. Like the infamous Piss Christ of yesteryear, it’s the kind of knee-jerk art that gets people’s attention and causes wealthy buyers, desperate to stay ahead of the hip-curve, to line up with their checkbooks. Of course Waxman also takes the lazy and infuriating modernist stance that absolves the artist of any faults he might have and makes viewers almost entirely responsible for what they see in a painting. He is a manipulative jackass and a poseur who cleaves to his heritage only when it suits him politically. He is the artist-turned-ugly-American who has come to the English countryside to claim the one thing his millions of U.S. dollars can’t buy: the forgiveness of Patricia, a college sweetheart he left behind. Then again, maybe he just wants to get himself a little “old-time-sakes.” Hard to say.

Though she still obviously carries a torch for her famous ex, Patricia, now a world-wise archaeologist living with her caustic Brit husband in the north of England, isn’t interested in forgiveness. Her husband, Nick, who feels he’s always lived in Waxman’s shadow, is likewise determined to make the artist as uncomfortable as possible over the course of his visit. What ensues is a fiercely intelligent, surprisingly satisfying two-hour debate about art, history, heritage, family, and relationships. In the end, the work is too academic and desperately in need of a few laughs or at least a horrified gasp or two. It’s all heady wind-up with no pitch. Still, it’s an evening well spent.

As Waxman, Nate Eppler is nearly as aloof and creepy as Christian Bale in American Psycho. It’s impossible to tell whether or not he actually believes anything he says. Bill Lewis is equally convincing as Nick, a good-hearted man consumed by jealousy, resentment, and hatred. Kelly Morton’s performance as the jilted girlfriend become crumbling mountain of self-sufficency is inspired. She radiates strength, smarts, and self-control as she shifts easily back and forth in time from free-spirited, sexually liberated teen to conservative, jaded, and calculating adult.

Sight Unseen at the University of Memphis through March 10th.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Modern Love

I want to give Circuit Playhouse’s production of Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Robert’s musical essay on the perils of romance I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change a fabulously glowing review. In fact, I want to give it the ravingest rave that ever raved. But I can’t. Not entirely anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. It’s pretty darn close to being perfect. But in one very subtle, perhaps even nit-picky, way I wish that it could change: the script, that is, not the actual performances, which are all on the money.

Like so many contemporary scripts, I Love You tends to turn subtext into dialogue. In other words, the characters come right out and say the things which the audience should be allowed to discover. The best example of this is in the very first musical number, “Cantata for a First Date,” when the characters all begin singing, “But I’ve got baggage, emotional baggage, a planeload of baggage that causes much saggage.” To some extent, this substitution of subtext for dialogue satirizes the self-help Men are from Mars craze and, as they say in those silly, silly books, that’s okay. But if this was truly the authors’ intent, the insipid language which has grown up around that movement needed to be placed in somewhat larger quotation marks and examined a bit more carefully. As it stands, there are moments during the show when those of us who find such notions of “empowerment” to be the modern-day answer to snake oil will cringe with embarrassment. But those moments are fleeting and more than made up for in the script’s brutal, hilarious, and occasionally even touching honesty about that crazy little thing called modern love.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change is subtitled “The Hilarious New Musical Revue.” I don’t know why that is, but it is. It’s not a musical revue. It’s sketch comedy with music. It’s vaudeville. Oh sure, in their preface to the script the authors beg the performers to play the scenes for honesty, not laughs, noting that the comedy will be better that way, but this sentiment is true even in the broadest of farces. That they even feel the need to come out and say this is testament to the fact that live theater has lost its way. Fortunately, director Kevin Shaw and his more than capable cast know exactly where they are, what they are doing, and exactly how it should be done. On a stage designed to conjure up images of old-time vaudeville, complete with cutouts of red velvet curtains and illuminated placards announcing the names of the various sketches, Shaw and company have staged the most entertaining show to appear on the Circuit stage since the recently revived Pageant made its local debut.

Allow me to skirt all of the punch lines and give you the setup to a few of the scenes. “Satisfaction Guaranteed” is a commercial for a law firm that will sue your partner if they fail to satisfy you in bed. “A Stud and a Babe” shows us how even wallflowers can get lucky on occasion. “Tear Jerk” will appeal to every man who has ever agreed to take his date to a “chick flick.” “Sex and the Married Couple” explores all the factors that work against a nesting couple’s attempts to keep the flame alive, and “Funerals are for Dating” is about a widow and widower who look for love in unusual places. As you can see, the script’s content ranges from broad (Brecht-lite) satire to utterly mundane scenarios of family life. At the risk of sounding trite, I Love You has a little something for everyone. The songs run the gamut of popular forms and each one in its own way somehow manages to become a show-stopper. This is largely due to the efforts of one of the most capable casts ever assembled. Whether working as an ensemble or flying solo, Kim Justis, Carla McDonald, Guy Olivieri, and Christopher Swan (making a glorious return to the Memphis stage) generate big laughs and make it all look so very effortless.

I’ve always admired Kevin Shaw’s gifts as a choreographer, though I’ve never been all that impressed with his directing skills. I have to admit it: This time I’m impressed all the way around. Still, movement is obviously his forte. In the scene titled “The Family that Drives Together,” Shaw has used rolling office chairs to create one of the most inspired bits of choreography I’ve ever seen.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

Through March 18th, Circuit Playhouse

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Nine Lives Playhouse on the Square gets Seussical.

Viva el gato en sombrero! Apparently, Memphis audiences just can’t
get enough of that Seussical stuff, which is something of a
miracle when you consider that when it debuted in 2000, the ambitious
Dr. Seuss musical nearly transformed the world’s most famous feline
into rank road kill in a red-and-white-striped hippie hat. The original
production was conceived on a massive scale and combined characters,
locations, and plot elements from more than a dozen or so of Theodor
Geisel’s most beloved stories. And it didn’t survive too long on
Broadway, either. Reviewers trashed it and called it a snore; some
viewers thrashed it and thought it a bore. It was badmouthed and
trashmouthed and called consonantal. It couldn’t even be saved by Ms.
Rosie O’Donnell.

The most common diagnosis provided for the show’s critical and
commercial failure was that Seussical, while colorful,
thoughtfully scored, and based on tried-and-true source material, was
also an unfocused mess, crammed with too much Seussishness for anyone’s
comfort. Although his imagination could be baroque, Geisel was
essentially a minimalist. The original Cat in the Hat was
written as an exercise for young readers and only uses 236 mostly
monosyllabic words, so it’s not hard to imagine how Dr. Seuss’ simple,
delightfully strange imagery was swallowed whole by the glitz and
sizzle of a Broadway megamusical.

The show has since been recut, re-arranged, and turned into a
serviceable, not entirely uncharming little one-act focusing almost
entirely on the stories Horton Hears a Who! and Horton
Hatches the Egg, with brief forays into Yertle the
Turtle
, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs
and Ham, and I Had Trouble Getting to Solla Sollew.

There’s a lot to like about POTS’ Seussical and perhaps even
a lot to love. But there’s plenty to loathe too, especially if you’re a
purist and don’t want anybody messing with the shape of your childhood
memories.

Andrew Moore provides a hangdog take on Horton, the philosophical
pachyderm who can save an entire planet full of microscopic people but
can’t save himself from being conned into hatching an egg for a
brightly painted bird that would rather have fun. Kim Baker is even
more beguiling and tragic as Gertrude McFuzz, a less than fancy bird
who loves Horton but can never seem to catch his eye. As the Sour
Kangaroo who’s out to prove Horton a fool, Jennifer Henry makes the
most of Seussical‘s gospel-tinged score. Courtney Oliver, POTS’
able Jane-of-all-trades, has lovingly remounted director Gary John La
Rosa’s frenetic, whimsically theatrical staging.

On the other hand, it’s more than a little disconcerting that the
Wickersham Brothers are costumed as though they were part of a gay
minstrel show, in broadly stereotypical black leather pants, bar vests,
and motorcycle hats. Just as I started to think I might be a
dirty-minded so-and-so reading more into the costuming than was
actually there, out came the banana-shaped microphones. Adults will
giggle, and the kids will only see it as fun. But c’mon, people. What
happens in Tuna, Texas, really should stay in Tuna, Texas.

On this rare occasion, Rebecca Powell’s costumes are never much to
get excited about. The colors pop out against Bruce Bergner’s
magnificent white-on-white set, but the nonrepresentational outfits are
seldom Seussesque and never quite imaginative enough to spark the
imagination.

Bergner’s icy set reflects every color of the spectrum and is
another matter entirely. Using nothing but a jagged squiggle of a stair
unit, a pair of dangerously angled ladders, and a tree made from an
upside-down ceiling fan, Bergner forces the imaginations wide open with
austere silliness and a dash of horror.

And what of the Cat in the Hat? A manic, rubber-faced Eric Duhon
gets everything just about right. But this isn’t really the Cat’s show.
Even as a narrator he seems superfluous: a dangling, vaguely menacing
trademark bouncing and prancing across the stage.

Through January 11th at Circuit

Playhouse