Following her smashing success and Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel followed up with The Mineola Twins, a heavy-handed feminist condemnation of the right and the left. Presented last year by the Roundabout Theater in New York and starring the legendary Swoozie Kurtz, the piece received mixed reviews, and ended with an unspectacular run. In Mixed Company, always interested in presenting shows that would not ordinarily trot the boards in the Valley of the Sun, handed the piece to IMCo founder Kevin Kerrigan to see what he and Valley veteran Cathy Dresbach could do with the central and difficult double-time role. As great as these two can be, even they cannot overcome material as basically flawed as this. While the second act is definitely better than the first, Ms. Vogel has let her leftist leanings undermine what claimed to be an equal-time bashing of both extremes, and the result is less subtle satire, and more whiny slamfest of all things conservative and chauvinistic.
Myra and Myrna are children of Eisenhower's suburban 50s. While identical twins (save for their breasts, Myrna having been blessed with gigantic ones only a fetishist could love), they are exact opposites in ideologies. Myrna is the prototypical Republican dream, at home in Mineola, Long Island's suburban sameness. Myra is a poster child for the rabble-rousing Democrat, fleeing to New York City's leftist support. In six scenes and four dream sequences set in 1955, 1968, and 1990, the two mortal enemies battle one another and their opposing beliefs mercilessly, tearing down each other, and their loved ones around them, in a battle to the death.
The faults here are generally not those of Mr. Kerrigan or Ms. Dresbach, both of whom do as much as they can with what they are given. The greatest fault is the uneven balance of the twins. Myrna is a cardboard cutout, an easy knockdown target of all things universally negative about the values of the right. She moves from relentless high school cocktease to overbearing housewife and mother to bomb-toting conservative talkshow hostess in three easy moves. While Myra is treated in an equally unsubtle way, transforming from high school mattress and beat poet to radical bank robber on the lam to lesbian Planned Parenthood clinic director, her machinations are never of a spiteful or homicidal nature. Thus, it is with this unbalanced tract that cast and crew find themselves saddled.
Mr. Kerrigan moves the cast through this treacherous space with much imaginative staging, mixing farce with experimental. He creates the requisite stage pictures Ms. Vogel asks of him. Ms. Dresbach does well differentiating her two roles, although she seems hesitant at some points, and distrustful of her language at others. In the gender-bending roles of fiancée Jim and same sex partner Sarah, Razel Wolf uses the lack of subtlety of the script to extend the humor of her parts. Great work comes from T.J. Bigbee as the sons of the twins, Kenny and Ben. He, too, differentiates his roles well, and completely throws himself into the piece with wholehearted and misplaced belief in the material. Good, too, are Edis Donaghue-Chavez and Jessica Hunt in their smaller roles.
Michael P. Brooks unit set is quite imaginative, and David Vaught's lighting commendable. Paul Wilson's costumes are appropriate, and Bill Osborne's sound is effective, if a bit loud at times. Kudos go to his and Mr. Kerrigan's choice of music, probably the best thing in the show. The same cannot be said of Claudia Breckenridge's wig and makeup design, which extended the campiness of the show with unimpressive offerings.
I have heard from a local actress/director who initially considered involvement with the piece that this is actually an earlier piece of Vogel's dragged from the bottom desk drawer after the Pulitzer Prize made her work highly desired for production. It definitely smacks of an early work, as the subtlety of her later work is sadly missing, and it lacks emotional power. It is, though, probably the only time you'll see this show mounted in Phoenix, and it does improve somewhat from scene to scene. If unabashed conservative-bashing is your favorite sport, or you'd like to see talented people valiantly struggle with not-so-worthy material, you won't want to miss this.
Production Details:
The Mineola Twins by Paula
Vogel
In Mixed Company
Phoenix Theatre's Little Theatre, Phoenix
(602) 244-0384
December 1st - 23rd, 2000