Primary School Pathos and Party Girl Perversions


Reviewed 10/21/05

Every once in awhile, Stray Cat goes astray. It’s not from lack of reaching, or because they’re not willing to make the status quo feel uncomfortable. Sometimes the chemistry doesn’t work, choices don’t click, or performances backfire. You can’t always produce hits; that’s just the nature of the biz. When Stray Cat trips, it does it in the way that any hep cat would, they stumble and act like it was part of the routine. To open their season, they lurch and right themselves all in the same evening, but even when they trip, they’re still more interesting to watch than a season-full of safety. The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide by Sean Graney is like Dick and Jane stumble into an episode of the dearly departed HBO drama Six Feet Under, which is kinda interesting, and Nicky Goes Goth by Elizabeth Meriwether is this season’s drag answer to last season’s out of control Hysteric Studs. In most circumstances I would love the first and loath the second, but a weird mix of chemistries has reversed my feelings. For me, this is an evening that didn’t start until late night.

The Unbearable Lightness of Acting

Ron May only has himself to blame as to the misfiring of Graney’s interesting script. Asking actors to play nine year olds performing a tragedy of Jacobean proportions is simply nutty. In an attempt to bring closure to a senseless tragedy, a young schoolboy’s class performs his play after he has shot himself to death. The play is full of elementary school intrigues about taunting, self-image, puppy love, and bullying, but there is an air of desperation as the stakes are raised to a level never considered before Columbine.

May’s choice here seems to have been to ask the actors to act like fourth graders rather than to be fourth graders. It’s an interesting and mirthful one…for the first ten minutes, but this play continues for another fifty, and the concept gets old fast. I’m not certain that being truer in performance and not pretending to be nine year-olds would have worked any better, but it would have made more poignant the terrible ending of the pageant. Each performer does have moments of transcendence, some longer than others.

Central character Johnny is closer to the ideal, as played by Eric Zaklukiewicz, who gives some nice, subtle physicalizations to his haunted character, but he is often asked to make more obvious choices during interactions. Chelsea Monty’s taunted Rachel is subdued, almost lethargic, offering so much introspection that one wonders what Johnny sees in her. Brittany Schoenborn’s popular Sally is a prim treat, although her greatest moment comes between the two “acts,” when the audience watches the kid’s intermission, and Sally proves a little too knowledgeable about the role she plays. Alicia Sutton is funny as Sally’s minion, Brenda. Sutton’s talents would have better suited her for the shadings of Monty’s character, but here she deftly embodies the willing right-hand desperate for the edge of Sally’s spotlight. Ricky Araiza is a conundrum as bully Mike Rice. His performance is so heavy-handed at times, he plays like something out of a melodrama, but he handles the character’s odd asides so expertly, they seem to bubble up from inside the actor rather than from the playwright’s plotting. Rory Vandermark gives her best performance yet as the diligent Hall Monitor Lucy Law, screaming her lines yet seeming to understand the subtlety below the shouts.

It’s not a bad production, just one that starts to circle into embedded tracks. Less would have been more rather than going for the obvious laughs at the expense of the final haunting possibilities afforded by this tragedy within a pageant.

Is Paris Burning?

Where last season’s Hysteric Studs went everywhere a good little send-up should, with ho-hum results, Meriwether’s Nicky Goes Goth chews scenery like an after-hours show should, but it also adds the kind of screwiness that scripts like Wonder of the World have offered. Love smites reluctant heiress Nicky Hilton (Shawna Franks) in the form of a Billy Idol-like sneering Goth suburban puberty-battler with the self-anointed name of Shithead (Edgar Andrew Torrens). Tired of her endless one-night stands and clubbing with two posers, the questionably hetero Boomer (Matthew R. Harris) and his vapid bro Christian (Toussaint Jeanlouis), she falls for the dark. However, Sister Paris (Jeffrey Middleton) won’t let her go to the dark side. Meanwhile, Mom (Alice H. Beaver) tries to understand Shithead’s sudden Nihilism, and dad (Steve Wilcox) just wants to escape unscathed. This tale of unlikely love is told by Paris’ makeup slave Aaron (Marcos D. Voss), with the help of two dendrites (Kiki Harbster and Jessie Kiefer). Confused. You’ll get it when you see it. With Lindsey Harman’s energetic direction and often multi-layered stage pictures, you won’t miss a thing.

Voss sets the tone for the show, and though he’s a little swishier than is probably textually necessary, he does a nice job backhanding some of the script’s best zingers. It is Torrens, Franks, and Middleton who propel the action, and all three are offering their A-game. Torrens is a scream as Shithead. He captures that teeth-grinding moment in puberty when everything that the voices in your head shout sounds like the absolute right idea. His rictus grin and showy growling is an everlasting treat. Franks does a good job of not letting her character’s petulance bring down the show, and when her Nicky goes Goth, she becomes a hilarious little vixen. Middleton, though, gets it. Not having spent a lot of time around the Paris Hilton experience, I will never get past Middleton’s eye batting and Dorito-torture. He knows that subtlety in drag is like silence during sex; you can do it, but why?

Beaver is great in her dual roles of Shithead’s mother and id. She knows how to spin both characters to be opposite sides of the same couch. Kudos to Harris, who is becoming an impressive all-around actor. I didn’t even recognize him for the first several minutes he was onstage, playing a gangsta with the occasional slips into limp-wristedness.

Torren’s Shithead rises and falls in such an interesting and entertaining way, it allows for something more than you’d expect from empty calories. I don’t want to ruin it by saying there’s something more than aching sides to take away from a scream-fest, but this bag of Doritos ultimately makes for a healthy late-night snack.