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Your Connection To The Arts In San Diego
Funding for "Pat Launer, Center Stage", is provided by the Elaine Lipinsky Family Foundation.
It’s not a great week for the Catholic Church -- not just in the news but also onstage. The clergy takes a bit of a hit in two killer comedies: one light, the other dark and deadly. The well-meaning ministrations of an alcoholic Irish priest can’t keep battling brothers apart. And the knuckle-slamming, hidebound Buffalo nun can’t heal a damaged family. But they both try, with often amusing results.
The priest in “The Lonesome West” swears and swills with the best of ‘em. Martin McDonagh set this last of his gory Connemara trilogy in the tiny West Ireland town of Leenane, where everyone knows everyone’s business and violence seems to be the best antidote to mind-numbing boredom.
Coleman and Valene have just returned from their father’s funeral. The guy seems to have had an accident, finding himself in the crosshairs of Coleman’s ever-ready shotgun. “The good thing about being Catholic,” Coleman says cheerfully, referring to confession and redemption, “is that you can shoot your Dad in the head and it doesn’t mean a thing.” Although the priest, like several others in town, takes his own life, he leaves a note saying the boys can save his soul if they just get along. They try. Sort of. For about a minute. But this Cain-and-Abel duo just can’t leave each other alone. In the deliciously wicked and gleefully violent Triad production, they’re even assaulting each other during the curtain calls. Very funny stuff, if you don’t mind a little blasphemy in your comic mix.
In Tom Dudzick’s “Over the Tavern,” the biggest blasphemer is a 12 year-old, who has the audacity to question his catechism. Rudy Pazinski has his own theories of God and Hell, but Sister Clarissa will beat that out of him. He’s having a crisis of faith, kinda like the Priest in the other play. But his solution is to shop around for a more felicitous religion. At one point, he strips the ears off his Mickey Mouse hat and tries it out as a yarmulke. Meanwhile, he has his siblings to deal with and tease. His older brother is always getting into trouble, mainly with girlie magazines; the younger one, who’s retarded, has just learned a scatalogical expletive and is shouting it all over the place. There’s also a sister whose sexuality is beginning to bloom, a terribly put-upon mother and a gruff, pub-owning father who, like the nun, terrorizes the whole family.
The North Coast Repertory Theatre production is pitch-perfect – except for those pesky Buffalo accents. But with a superb cast, under the direction of David Ellenstein, every character portrayal is sheer delight.
Neither of these plays has much of a message, but they’re funny, and each shows a faint potential for change at the end. And considering the verbal or physical brutality, both productions are extremely well executed, if you’ll pardon the pun.
“The Lonesome West” runs through July 7, at the 10th Avenue Theatre downtown.
“Over the Tavern” continues through July 12, at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.
© 2009 Pat Launer
A year ago, acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally wrote “Unusual Acts of Devotion,” a comic drama about desire, dissatisfaction and the various permutations of love – for spouse, friends, neighbors, elders, even the borough of Manhattan.
Fifty years ago, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt penned “The Fantasticks,” a small, intimate musical about one allegorical love, and it feels a whole lot fresher than the newer play.
“The Fantasticks” actually made the Guinness Book, as the world’s longest-running musical – 42 years, 17,000 performances. A half-century from now, we’ll still be intrigued by its bittersweet story of the innocence of first love and its inevitable journey from fantasy to hard, cold reality, from “scenic to cynic,” as the song goes. We will have long forgotten McNally’s trite trifle of a play, which trades in superficial sentiment and sophomoric wisdom.
“Unusual Acts of Devotion” premiered last fall in Philadelphia, where it featured a beautiful rooftop setting backed by a twinkling New York skyline. That same set, and the excellent lighting and sound design, are the most memorable aspects of this West coast premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, directed by Trip Cullman. The characters who meet on the Greenwich Village roof are not fully dimensional, so we never really care about them or their sexual secrets and entanglements. Even with five-time Emmy winner Doris Roberts and Tony Award-winner Harriet Harris, the piece fails to engage – or to tell a story – except for revealing the playwright’s own melancholy, nostalgia and premonitions of death. The final monologue, spoken by an old, derisive, dying woman, amusingly played by Roberts, is sheer fortune cookie philosophy. The play feels like a writer’s early, clumsy effort, with the world-weariness of age tacked on.
But at Lamb’s Players Theatre, “The Fantasticks” feels young and refreshing all over again. Musical director Charlie Reuter, in collaboration with musical consultant Jon Lorenz, has jazzed up the score, and even made one number into a rap song. The four-piece band, including harp, is breezy and energetic. Under the assured and whimsical direction of Deborah Gilmour Smyth, the cast is outstanding, and the musical retains its original sense of magic, spontaneity and wonder.
As the bright-eyed and briefly disillusioned young lovers, Steve Limones and Courtney Evans are delightful. Lambs’ artistic director Robert Smyth gives a bravura performance as the comical, bloviating faux Shakespearean. John Rosen and Antonio “T.J.” Johnson make a terrific team as the two conspiring fathers, who build a wall between their yards to keep their children apart, even though they really want them to be together.
So, what’ve we got? A free-flowing, effortless fable and a strained, self-conscious semi-narrative. Choose the love story you’d most love.
“Unusual Acts of Devotion” runs through June 28 at the La Jolla Playhouse.
“The Fantasticks” continues through July 26 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.
© 2009 Pat Launer
For an archive of all of Pat's reviews, going back to 1990, use the 'search' function at www.PatteProductions.com.
