|
October 1 - October 7, 2003 Run of the Mill Theater Makes a Suitably Absurd Debut By Brennen Jensen Before diving into the details of this pair of perverse playlets,
an explanation is in order regarding who is putting the shows on
and where. This evening of works by Christopher Durang and Eugene
Ionesco is being presented by the brand-new Run of the Mill Theater
company at the new home of the formerly itinerant Mobtown Players.
The Mobtown group has leased the theater space that had been developed
by the now-defunct Axis Theatre in Hampden's Meadow Mill complex;
Run of the Mill has an agreement with the Mobs, giving them periodic
access to the stage. Are you getting all this? Amid this tomfoolery, "insane" Jane is a bastion of clear thinking--the only person not having an identity implosion. Durang is clearly poking fun at psychoanalysis, but "fun" is the key word here. Company artistic director James Knipple told the audience before the show not to try to follow the action too closely, but rather simply to sit back and enjoy the brazen goofiness. Clearly, the gaggle of ever-giggling schoolgirls in the front row was responding to the show's near-slapstick antics, rather than the broad skewering of Freudian theory. The performances help carry the chaos over, with Wroblewski taking top honors for her maddeningly mad mother While the Fromage family is having its meltdown, a human voice going "cuckoo!" is sometimes heard offstage. The cuckoo call returns in The Bald Soprano, though this time it's a standard cuckoo clock call we hear. This is the most overt way Knipple endeavors to unite these two works. While both plays deal with the shifting concept of identity, Ionesco--a pioneer in the theater of the absurd movement in the 1950s--primarily targets the limits of language and the empty complacency of middle-class life. The action revolves around a series of set pieces concerning a pair of couples socializing in the London suburbs. In one of the more shrill and colorful scenes, a Mr. and Mrs. Martin (Benjamin Lawrence and a very engaging Jenny Tibbels) discuss a series of "bizarre" and "what a coincidence" events in their lives that ultimately serve to remind them that they are in fact married to each other, and not strangers. A far quieter and more unsettling scene has the Martins and the Smiths (Janel Miley and Nicholas Perrone) engaging in some of the most awkward and dragged-out small talk ever uttered. It's cringe-inducing. Back on the boisterous side of things, Jed Duvall jauntily plays a fire chief who crashes the couples' party and slickly delivers a maniacal monologue that amounts to nothing more than a string of familial connections. Absurd, yes. But also fascinating. All told, Run of the Mill does a good job delivering the dottiness in such ways as to make you both think and chuckle, a decent debut for the startup company. The sets for both pieces are rather frumpy, just assemblages of mismatched thrift-store furniture--perhaps a reflection of the limited time the company had to develop the production--but the performances, while at times a little too frantic, are solid. In particular, Tibbels, late of the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is described in the program as a company Acting Associate. She should be an especially welcome addition to the Baltimore acting scene.
|
