Because our page count is tight, I often have to cram two reviews
into the space of one. Usually, that’s not a problem, but this week, we
have very strange bedfellows snuggled up together: a family-friendly
romp at the Gaslight Theatre, and a strictly adult drama at Live
Theatre Workshop.
I’ll start with the family fare, and then you children can go do
something safe, like play in the street, while I have a few words with
the grown-ups about the other show.
Gaslight’s latest musical spoof is Harlie’s Angels, a takeoff
on that cheesy 1970s TV series about a trio of foxy detectives who
worked for a never-seen boss named Charlie. Gaslight writer-director
Peter Van Slyke is taking a bit of a risk here, because Charlie’s
Angels was already the victim of a couple of big-budget Hollywood
send-ups. How can this stage effort compete? But the Gaslight treatment
operates, as usual, on an entirely different plane of reality; it’s as
much a parody of the disco movement as a TV satire, with the sorts of
villains you’d find in Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The bad guys are more interesting than the heroines here. It’s the
1970s, and the Slobovians have resolved to take over the
world—the world of disco, that is—but their efforts have
been hampered by the defection of their one international disco
superstar, Flavio Suave (Todd Thompson in an unreliable blow-dried
wig). The head of the Slobovian Secret Service (David Orley, playing a
cross between Mr. Big and Dr. Evil) and intelligence-committee member
Comrade Ninetchka (Nancy LaViola) send out a pair of operatives, the
Piroshki brothers (Mike Yarema and Charlie Hall), to take Flavio out of
circulation and establish themselves as disco stars. The brothers are
unpromising performers—they can’t get a position higher on the
charts than David Hasselhoff—until they are placed in a machine
that rearranges their molecular structure to maximize getting their
groove on. They emerge as a pair of “wild and crazy guys” inspired by
old Saturday Night Live sketches.
The Angels (Sarah Vanek, Deborah Klingenfus and Tarreyn Van Slyke)
and their watcher (Joe Cooper) are less compelling as characters; the
women aren’t much more than quasi-airheads who know martial arts, which
actually isn’t much different from the TV show. But there is some
amusing hair-flipping, some single-finger karate action and an
underwater fistfight to keep things funny. Some of the best
song-and-dance work comes from secondary figures, particularly Yarema
and LaViola.
The show-closer is an olio paying tribute to Hollywood musicals,
primarily The Wizard of Oz. Presumably to avoid copyright
trouble, the affectionate condensation stops about two-thirds of the
way through the story. What a disappointment; I was looking forward to
the flying monkeys.
Now, kids, run along to the comic pages in the back of the paper,
and be careful not to peek at the smut section along the way. I have to
tell everyone else about a very fine and grown-up show presented as
part of Live Theatre Workshop’s late-night Etcetera series.
Anne Thibault’s I Wrote This Play to Make You Love Me is
about a traveling actress named Lysette and her adventures in
promiscuity. But this is not just another play about oversexed theater
people; it’s a sensitive, funny and poignant study of a woman grappling
with abandonment issues. If the play has a fault, it’s that the
audience can figure out Lysette’s problem much, much sooner than
Lysette does, but this is not because she’s superficial; she’s just in
too deep to find a useful vantage point.
“This is the 33rd bed I’ve slept in this year,” Lysette declares,
“though work doesn’t account for all of them.” Lysette is a bit heftier
than casting directors and singles-bar horndogs generally prefer, yet
she has managed to land a series of short-term lovers and the lead role
in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—a play in which a woman abandons
her family, which is exactly what Lysette’s mother did decades
before.
This leads Lysette to contemplate the identities she has chosen for
herself in real life, not just in the theater, and her reliance on
serial fake intimacy. This is not a dirty show—there’s no
simulated sex, and very little raw dialogue—but it is distinctly
adult in its frank consideration of the tensions between freedom and
commitment.
As Lysette, Amanda Gremel securely holds the stage for an hour and a
half, presenting to us a determined survivor who is all too aware of
her flaws. Gremel can be girlish, authoritative, hesitant,
wistful—whatever the scene requires—without slackening a
consistent, tight thread of character that runs from the play’s
beginning to end.
Director Christopher Johnson takes all the play’s male roles, most
of them offstage. The one exception is his appearances as Lysette’s
brother, the man who loves her most and best; there’s real, honest,
touching affection between Johnson and Gremel, creating some of the
most effective episodes in the story. The rest of the time, Johnson is
a sequence of disembodied voices, the parade of other men in Lysette’s
life, and he manages to produce a new, thoroughly distinct character
every couple of minutes.
Despite what the title suggests, I Wrote This Play to Make You
Love Me is not an excuse for Thibault to wallow in
semi-autobiographical self-pity. It’s a sincere self-appraisal, given a
spare, honest presentation.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.