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.