Natives
by Janet Neipris
Directed by Mark DeMichele
Arizona
Jewish Theatre Company
Viad Playhouse on the Park, Phoenix
(602) 264-0402
March 25 through April 9, 2006
$26.00 - $30.00 ($7 Student Rush half hour before curtain)
Discount
tickets may be available at 
If you want to laugh, Natives, now playing at Arizona Jewish Theatre Company, will give you what you want. If you want substance with your laughter, it's a near miss, but still gives pleasure.
Manhattanite playwright Janet Neipris is dealing with a serious human issue, the nearly forgotten freedom and love life of almost Every-woman turning fifty (and over). That‚s the problem of Viola, who’s both narrator (yes, in the 17th century novel style of direct address to the audience) and protagonist.
In this production, Vi’s played by AJTC’s producing director Janet Arnold. So season’s ticket buyers have seen her frequently, relying on her sensible, creative management of this theater for years.
Last Saturday night (March 25), most of the audience seemed ready to laugh and did. But the laughter was sometime whole-house gut busting, and sometime less than. (Once, a literary joke that only I laughed at.)
Violet’s three daughters land, so to speak, on her itinerary, just as she’s about to take off on a much needed start of her new, long-imagined, indefinitely delayed life of freedom. It couldn’t be a less opportune time for the three sisters’ lives to fall apart. A suddenly need the safety of home and mom’s nest.
With Jenna Robino as Emily, the rad-chic proletariat ethnologist type (and not exactly in-sync in an Atlantic seaboard culture where social positioning is still very much calculated by Seven Sisters‚ graduating classes), with Kerry McCue, as the vaguely ascetic closeted lesbian whose lover has just run off with another woman, and Angela Calabrasi, as the foodie married to a food critic whose conjoined passion has led them to (ugh!) write a book about eating, Arnold couldn’t be in better company.
Then add the two bustling Y-chromosome types, Mark. S.P. Turvin (yup, the daddy of this blog) as the profundo-rotundo (and snarky) food critic, Gary, and Michael Tassoni, as Sultan Titi (his pet name), a friend of the King of Sumba, who’s met and wooed Emily on the beach in a Balinese archipelago - but whose really just Arnold Mittleman from the Bronx - and the dynamics of ante-up goes wild.
This is one production where youth steals the show from the accomplished. Each of “the kids,” under the direction of Mark DeMichele, provides an individually stylish version of over the top. Turvin even turns on one toe while kicking a door open while carrying stuff into the next room. (Whoever wudda thunk he kud move that fast and, actually, that well!?)
Tassoni is perfectly paired with Robino, and when the couple finally decides to do a 21st century version of selling out, we pretty much know they’ll have a comfortable life for the next 15 years or so, at least. (Nothing’s permanent, ya know!) McCue very nearly makes us feel her pain - that is, till we’re sure her next lover will come along. And if Calabrasi can’t quite make this cynic really care whether her pairing with Turvin splits or stays, somehow that’s also a right part of family life.
But it’s far less fortunate that Arnold, who plays a damned fine mom and terrific narrator here, hasn’t turned out a scene of meltingly delicious foreplay with her new Black lover Avery, played by Ken Love. Said DeMichele, who else in town should play this part but Love? Admitting for a moment that type casting works, and that these two actors have lots of credits that make them respected for some very fine work, viewers of the steam in their new relationship have simply got to be carried away. But Neipris, writing into the scene all the reasons why this relationship won’t last, leaves Vi playing interception, vocally and physically. Sure, that makes for laughs, but it’s so jarringly played here that this couple’s love interest seems so close to real life it doesn’t get to ambrosial.
Then there’s that Arnold’s too short and Love’s way too tall for her (no symbolism intended). Except for that time when they’re slow dancing and more than half-shadowed, their pairing is obviously quite a stretch. And a bit of an uncomfortable one. Arnold could have factored in more lingering sequential movement to create sensuousness. And if she’d only left his hand (so huge that it covers one whole buttock) there a little longer before she straightened him out.
But, of course, that’s all up to the director. If DeMichele could have found ways to extend some of their breathy silence, maybe a scene that every older woman in the audience (of any age) could wrap a bit of their personal history around would have worked.
So what’s a short, good mom to do when she wants to get romantic again and her age - something quite beyond her control - advances? Now that’s a serious question- and one that’s been answered, oh, a million times a week by women everywhere in the world, but it takes some kind of wizardry to put it on the stage and make it read as a direct hit, unless it’s perfect.
But there’s so much to love this show, viewers will laugh hard enough, they’ll love the cast, and they’ll walk out of the theatre knowing they’ve had a good time.
Tickets are $27 to $31 for the 8 p.m., shows Thursdays through Sundays, with matinees at 2 p.m. Sundays only, with an early show Sunday at 7 p.m.
Through Sunday, April 9 at Playhouse on the Park, 1850 N. Central Avenue, inside Viad Corporate Center. It’s best to reserve ahead at (602) 264-0402 or www.azjewishtheatre.org.
Reach the writer at roburnett@hotmail.com.