review of *The 39 Steps*

at Interplayers through Oct. 30

It's funnier if you're funny without showing us that you know you're funny, you know?
The 39 Steps — a spoof of the veddy British 1935 spy-caper movie by Alfred Hitchcock, performed with just four actors with a lot of props and quick changes — certainly signals its comic intentions.
An innocent man gets himself ensnared in international intrigue, chased over loch and heather (he's in Scotland, you see) by policemen and double agents and a self-righteous woman who refuses to believe in his innocence. Of course, we never really think that our hero, the dapper Richard Hannay (Damon Mentzer) is going to succumb to the nefarious forces that encircle him — he has such an awfully dashing mustache, don't you know — but we're also not entirely sure how he's going to escape, either, especially with an uncooperative blonde handcuffed to him.
And it's a hoot. When the newsboy transforms into a Bobby with nightstick and then a traveling underwear salesman — all with switched hats and accents — it's delightful to watch in a clap-your-hands, jack-in-the-box surprise kind of way. When Jerry Sciarrio (in one of several dozen roles as Clown No. 1) transitions from a dignified lord of the manor to a goose-stepping, lunatic Nazi, the threat's rendered comic and harmless even as we giggle over the actor's venture into make-believe. Things happen fast, and we're invited to join in the fun: chairs become car seats, picture frames are held up to become escape hatches, audience members are invited onstage while the overworked actors rest for a while in front-row seats.

Michael Ward's set design rims the stage with bric-a-brac, and director William C. Marlowe has committed his show to a grab-a-prop-and-run operation.
Too often, the props get in the way. Oh, Marlowe loves his sight gags and sound gags — holds them and clutches them, crushes them in his arms, then ravages them and leaves them quivering, still barely alive, in the dust. In particular, the thunder-and-lightning gag that accompanies one of the play's key phrases became, with repetition, less amusing than annoying.

The action is set in the 1930s, with the Nazis threatening Europe. But when Marlowe camps up the proceedings with a disco ball or the Jeopardy theme, there's a sense that we're being condescended to — as if we couldn't enter into the comic spirit of a romp through pre-war British culture without a wink and a nod. It's funny — Hannay is faced with a serious dilemma, and that familiar quiz-show music comes over the speakers — but it's funny in terms other than the show itself is funny. And Patrick Barlow's frenzied four-actor adaptation — which refines two actors' reinterpretation of three movies' worth of revisions of the original novel — has plenty of laughs to offer all on its own, thank you very much indeed, sir.

In fact, the biggest laughs in Interplayers' production of The 39 Steps — and there are many bright spots in this show — land not because of all the wigs and props and furniture, but because of the acting. In particular, in the three-way role of femme fatale, innocent farmer's wife and skeptical love interest, Elisha Gunn is a revelation. With the opening scene's German woman of mystery, Gunn wrests multiple meanings out of single words: When she comes on to Hannay, she turns the final three syllables of "You wish to be — in-VOL-ved?" into a symphony of seduction, rubbing her thigh once up, once down, no more. She's a woman on a mission. She rolls the R's in "Richard" for so long that his name seems to tumble out the door and come back in again. For a melodramatic scene involving murder, she flops around like a stuck fish (and Marlowe hits upon an ingenious way of getting one character out from beneath a corpse). In the second act, when her third character is angry about being forced into proximity with Hannay, Gunn spits out a feigned agreement of "Yes, darling" with about six different kinds of irritability and rancor in it.
In a later sequence, as a dour Scottish farmer's wife, you might think Gunn is overdoing the skipping, barefoot ingenue bit until it pays off when she curls her toes around a chair leg, then extends them over to Hannay's side of the table for a flirty game of footsie — all while her Calvinist husband (Damon Abdallah, in one of his Clown No. 2 roles) intones a parody of saying a guilt-ridden grace, imploring our "unforgiving Father" to "beat our gluttonous thoughts and lash our lustful desires, as with a three-forked flailing stick, pressing our bestial noses to the grindstone...." Self-disdain like that is funny, especially when we see "lustful desires" going on under the dinner table.

But when you overload a show with stage business, verbal humor like that can get overshadowed. Hannay has a naive quality — slow to realize that he's been seduced or duped, easily distracted by trivia, rather vain about his appearance, willing to believe the best of others even when they're schemers — and Mentzer has pipe-clenched-in-teeth, grinning quality that lives just down the block from Dudley Do-right. His little witticisms and side comments sometimes get squashed by the insistence on scampering over to fetch the next prop.
The scene when Hannay is pushed into public speaking is an example of Marlowe's comic business over-burdening the text. The joke lies in Mentzer's character being caught in a pickle and understandably nervous about it; but a pop-up, roll-over bit of physical comedy detracts from the scene's focus (though it has to be admitted: Mentzer changes pace during the speech, improvising a rousing ovation that electrified the opening-night crowd).

Meanwhile, the two clowns generate a lot of verbal jokery. Abdallah gets comic mileage out of two different characters by making them, in different ways, almost completely unintelligible. Sciarrio's doddering hotel keeper and insane Aryan form hilarious contrasts. Abdallah can do both ends of a phone conversation; Sciarrio can imitate the ignition-cough of a '30s clunker starting up.
And this is the kind of show where the cues come in deliberately late: First you get the comic ineptitude, then you get a second joke out of the actors glaring at the sound booth. The 39 Steps proclaims its amateurishness for all to hear, though sometimes you just wish it would stop proclaiming and get on with the next chase scene and predicament.

All four actors have brilliant moments, and when they settle comfortably into the run, some of the timing issues (bobbled lines, cues that hit just a tad late) and diction problems (exaggerated German and Scottish accents aren't funny if they're completely indecipherable) will disappear.
Marlowe's 39 Steps is creative, inventive, rollicking. It just needs some editing: Sometimes, gags just need to be gagged.

(a shorter version of this review will appear on Oct. 21 in The Pacific Northwest Inlander)

Review of *Amadeus*

at Lake City Playhouse through Sunday (April 1-3 at 7:30 pm)

Few local productions have been more deserving of a bigger budget than Amadeus. With a powerful performance by Damon Abdallah as Antonio Salieri (the accomplished composer who is nonetheless outshone by Mozart’s brilliance) and several features that distinguish it from what you think you know (from the 1984 movie) about the script, director Jhon Goodwin’s production accomplishes much with minimal resources.

Barren set. The Vienna court nobles, not in powdered wigs and silks, but running around in shirts and ties like so many middle managers or insurance salesmen. Mozart’s wife, Salieri’s prize pupil, and the two Venticelli (here played by two women) displaying cleavage in corsets atop long skirts – plenty of sex appeal, but a contemporary look instead of 18th-century elegance.

The payoff in making such a virtue of (financially constrained) necessity was in Eric Paine’s hipster Mozart, a Hollywood producer type in floppy sleeves and jeans, way cooler and more rebellious than his aristocratic Viennese patrons. Here, the contemporary touch worked: at a glance, you could see who’s uptight and who isn’t.

Playwright Peter Shaffer has revised his script repeatedly, pointedly making room in the conclusion for greater historical accuracy (or at least less self-assurance about the circumstances of the Requiem and Mozart’s death at age 35). That, the de-emphasis of spectacle and underscoring of the language here, Paine’s unself-consciousness about the fact of Mozart’s genius, and the energy provided by the Venticelli are all reasons to take in this show (and not assume that you’re good because once, long ago, you saw the movie).

As Salieri’s gossip-mongerers and hangers-on, Marnie Rorholm and Ariel Cansino emphasize seductiveness over energy. The suggestion that poor repressed, conservative, married Salieri has beautiful admirers sets up his manipulative seduction of Mozart’s wife Constanze (Janelle Frisque, sultry) nicely, but the energy of rapid-fire news-gathering seemed to be missing. The Venticelli, however, allow Shaffer to move the plot along and provide Salieri some allies, so he’s not quite so alone.

Abdallah — at first hunched over as an elderly man in a wheelchair, later the hands-crossed-in-submission schemer at court — delivers one of the best local performances in memory. He achieves great intensity in the Act One-closing sequence, Salieri’s impassioned rejection of any God who would choose vulgar Wolfy instead of dignified Antonio to be the vessel of divine musical brilliance. (“What use is man, if not to teach God a lesson?” – Yikes, I could feel the blasphemy and feared the oncoming thunderbolt.)

Shaffer’s much-reworked plot and some laggard pacing, however, worked against the effect: at two and a half hours, some of Shaffer’s urgings about Salieri as mediocre talent, the resentment of Mozart’s childish behavior, his ravings against God — all seemed over-extended. Goodwin might’ve trimmed here and there — and in the blocking, he sometimes allowed five-person-wide static groupings of actors to impede the onstage progress.

Paine, a talented comedic actor, was engaging the early going, with his high-pitched giggles and calm self-persuasion that yes, I am just about the greatest composer who has ever lived. (You have to admire a guy who commuted weekly, 800 miles roundtrip from Marysville, for the sake of a volunteer acting gig; and he was memorable in Lend Me a Tenor at the Civic in 2002). But the final, tragic sequence seemed beyond Paine’s grasp: the loss of his art and his Constanze still had a kind of bemusement about it, when the script calls for tragedy and despair.

Random notes: Abdallah’s dismissive gesture on “the voice of God in an obscene child” was powerful. Paine looked authentic in plinking away at the “harpsichord.” Paine’s mockery of Italian composing as unimaginative (“tonic and dominant, on and on”) was self-assured. Words like “breeches,” Idomeneo and “seraglio” were mispronounced. Frisque was reluctantly seductive and Abdallah was nervous and awkward — both, just as the script calls for — in their seduction scene. Paine needs more weight in his remorse over the (retold) death of Mozart’s father, Leopold — and more horror and guilt near the play’s end.

Despite flaws, however, Goodwin has presented a meaningful drama that reconceptualizes some of what it means to go on in life, as we all do, knowing that we aren’t the best at what we do. Not even near it. And yet on we trudge.

Salieri, a mediocrity, speaks for and to us. And some of those moments under Bryan Durbin’s light design — Abdallah’s upturned, anguished face; Paine’s quizzical chortling — are moments that will live in your memory. If you get out to CdA this weekend.


Coming up at Lake City Playhouse:
Jekyll & Hyde (the musical), May 1-2, 6-9, 13-16, 20-23
lakecityplayhouse.org

opening-night review: *Underneath the Lintel*

What if you went on a wild-goose chase and the goose turned out to be God?

Underneath the Lintel is a play of nervous laughter — of the playwright, Glen Berger, who composed this spiritual quest of a philosophical comedy, this vaudeville routine for harried clown filled with mysteries and angst; of the solo actor performing it; of those of us in the audience, out in the dark, who wonder about what our lives might mean, or if they mean anything at all. (We’re willing to laugh at ourselves, the possibility of our insignificance, but not much. Not so very much.)
During Reed McColm’s one-man rendition — amusing, flawed, halting, eventually moving — a lot of people will find themselves laughing nervously.

Reference librarians, world travelers, vaudeville comedians, Jews and mystery lovers will all find themselves reflected in Berger’s play. Also anybody who has ever looked up at the nighttime sky and wondered what the hell we’re doing here, and what it all means.

McColm’s Dutch librarian appears to us at first from out of the shadows, emerging from behind the blackboard nervously, clutching his suitcase of “evidences,” halting and too deferential. Will he be soft-voiced and anxious all night? We could be in for a long two hours.
Right away, there are references to death and transience, erasure, the insignificance of our lives. There’s the nervous laughter. This is a comedy?

In the overnight bin, the Librarian has found a book that’s 113 years overdue. (Much smacking of the forehead.) Inside are clues that lead him successively to a village in China, to a shtetl in Poland, to a dry cleaner’s in London. It becomes an obsessive historical quest that Berger’s script manages to make, in succession, ridiculous, unlikely, questionable, probable, profound.

There’s much that’s delightful in McColm’s performance — the librarian’s love of trivia; the funny little skips and jigs; the way he breaks down the fourth wall and our expectations; the way how, when the prospect of an international journey opens up, his face brightens with anticipation. But there is also much that could be improved.
McColm’s overdone initial nervousness makes us nervous; so do Berger’s references to death and decay. More energy and eccentricity from the outset would be reassuring: “We may be stuck with this odd Librarian fellow,” viewers might think, “but at least his tics and strange perspectives might make the time pass agreeably.”

On opening night, McColm experienced multiple writing-implement failures — his chalk kept cracking and flying away from the chalkboard — and the way he improvised his way around that and into comedy was instructive. “American chalk,” he deadpanned; later, he explained verbally what he was supposed to have drawn (before the chalk broke). The audience recognized the spontaneity and laughed all the harder.
The contrast, unfortunately, was with some of McColm’s more obviously contrived and halting moments.
He’s too nervous at the outset. Sometimes he’s reaching for his lines. There’s much fussing and dithering — with an eccentric European nerd, we expect as much — but there are also limits. In several instances, the grasping for cues during jokes led to pauses that overextended or undermined the punch lines. There was some misnumbering of evidence items and some miscalculating of dates — forgivable, but they popped us right out of the play.
And there were two larger flaws: an accent of indeterminate origin that went away for long stretches and then returned, unannounced, along with a noticeable first-act lack of energy.
Midway through Act One, our Librarian friend finds himself poring over the account books for an English estate sometime in the early 18th century — something to do with a fox hunt, don’t inquire too much — and McColm delivers an entertaining playlet between a proper British twit and a grotesque intruder. Problem was, when it was time to revert to the Dutchman’s (Russian? East European?) accent, it was nowhere to be found, and for several minutes. Then it showed up again.
And then the pace lagged: too many pauses and umm’s, too much loss of momentum. The Librarian is feverish: the hall’s rented for tonight, and he has this fantastic story to tell, and he’s taken a huge chance (his “daring gambit,” he calls it) by leaving work and going to places that this stay-at-home bookish fellow never thought he would go, and he’s onto his huge philosophical mystery…. There needs to be frenzied, commanding mania, nearly from the outset. But director Damon Abdallah and McColm have chosen too tentative a path for the opening. Berger’s little rest stops (the Librarian’s recollections of lost love, the petty grievances with co-workers, the wonders presented by exotic cultures) allow the respites we need (in case they’re worried about being too intense from the beginning and then having nowhere to go).
So the performance lacks a sense of increasing mania. But it also has its delights: McColm’s self-satisfied little shake of the head (for when the Librarian has unearthed a tidbit of knowledge); the glasses on the end of the nose; the index finger held up for attention; the crucial, tagged piece of evidence held triumphantly aloft. He plays to our guilt: Audiences love the I’ve-been-naughty-you-caught-me tone in accounts of what librarians feel and say when some unthinking patron violates the library’s rules.
And there was evidence of another kind — that McColm had entranced his audience — when the big reveal was made (the identity of the character whom the Librarian has been hunting down) and you could (apologies for the cliché) hear a pin drop; he had them in the palm of his hand. Soon after, a re-enactment of a biblical episode, and again the watchful quiet.
The first act ends with a characteristic joke. The Librarian — the homebody, the man of routine, is going to risk all and gallivant off to China in search of clues. “The land of rice!” he exclaims. He can’t believe these things he’s planning and places he’ll go — “… me, who had Hunan chicken once … and got the runs for a week.”

My recurring thought — “this’ll get better as the run goes on” — was borne out within the opening-night performance itself: The second act, as compared with the first, feels more accomplished, frenetic, funny, profound and moving.
Even then there are the unnerving references to death and destruction (a flood in China, the vastness of the universe). We’re indifferent to the fate of people we don’t know, the Librarian explains: “Unless you knew him, it’s all just behind the couch,” he says. Millions die halfway around the world, and we turn to another section of the newspaper.

McColm is especially good at comic deflation — those moments when he arouses anticipation, then lets it fall flat. (“And do you know what I found? … nothing.”)
There are some second-act passages about regret over lost love and raging against the injustice of fate (of having to live in a world ruled over by a God who allows our lives to be fated) … that seem unprepared for.
But by and large, Act Two is funnier. The merger of the Librarian and the audience and the fugitive whom he’s searching for seems clearer; and McColm makes his bookish fellow more obsessed, more despairing and more defiant — all of which ratchets up the performance’s energy level and interest.

We are all, each one of us, the legendary, mythical biblical character whom the Librarian pursues so obsessively. We’re none of us content with all the frantic running around that we find ourselves doing on the surface of this rock that’s hurtling around an insignificant star. Both funny and sad, Berger’s play taps into the mixed existential mood — just as Charlie Chaplin and Samuel Beckett did, just as McColm will once his act finds its groove.


Final notes:
Painting: by Marc Chagall
Underneath the Lintel runs at Interplayers through Dec. 12. Visit interplayers.com.
Jim McCurdy should not butt into curtain speeches and double their length with rambling sales pitches.
I counted 80 in attendance on opening night (in a theater that holds 250). Some playgoers left at intermission. Too bad, because they missed the better of the two acts and the resolution of the mystery. (McColm pauses early in the show, peers out, asks, “Is this all there is?” — and the moment is, for now, too self-reflexive for comfort.) Here’s hoping for bigger houses….
For a video preview of Underneath the Lintel, visit either inlander.com (under “Arts and Culture”) or youtube.com/theinlander.

video preview: *Underneath the Lintel*

at Interplayers, Nov. 25-Dec. 12

See snippets of Reed McColm as the Librarian both in performance and in rehearsal with director Damon Abdallah (who really needs to get back on his meds, as you'll see).

AVAILABLE THURSDAY, NOV. 19:

Visit them here at youtube.com/theinlander

[ photo of book jacket from broadwayplaypubl.com ]

*Underneath the Lintel* at Interplayers

Underneath the Lintel by Glen Berger
Directed by Damon Abdallah
Starring Reed McColm as the Dutch Librarian
at Interplayers, Nov. 25-Dec. 12
Underneath the Lintel premiered in L.A. and New York in 2001
Berger is presently co-writing Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark with Julie Taymor — a musical with music by Bono and the Edge that may or may not open on Broadway in February, or April, or ...
[Tammy Marshall photos for The Inlander]

opening-night review of *Exits and Entrances*

at Spokane Interplayers Ensemble through Nov. 1

It’s a play about lives in the theater that, ironically, isn’t very dramatic. Athol Fugard’s remembrance of the “ageing old gay ham” who changed a young man’s life is simply too talky and static. Fugard’s *Exits and Entrances* — a two-hander for idealistic young playwright and rueful old actor, directed without much energy here by Karen Kalensky — spends too much time telling us about emotions instead of enacting them. It’s a meandering play of reminiscences without many effective points to make, and even in its set pieces of dramatic intensity — three soliloquies in which the veteran actor is expected to display his craft — Maynard Villers isn’t entirely up to the role’s demands.
*Exits and Entrances* (at Interplayers through Nov. 1) intensifies in a second-act debate about political versus escapist theater — and it nicely advocates the necessity of humility in a couple of sequences — but for the most part, and despite the understated sincerity of Damon Abdallah as the youthful idealist, it’s talky and uninspiring evening (even at just 100 minutes, and even with an intermission added).
Fugard (who’s 76 now) has written a memory play spanning 1956-61. Calling himself, simply, the Playwright, he inserts himself (as a dresser and fellow actor) into the stage-life of Andre Huguenet, the preeminent South African actor of his era. The two men talk and reminisce and talk. After an effective scene-setting monologue by Abdallah delivered in a good-enough-for-my-ears South African accent, we’re thrust backstage at an amateur-except-for-Huguenet production of Oedipus Rex, with the veteran running his lines, dabbing on makeup and then venturing out under the lights after his calamity has struck and he’s self-blinded.
Much of the problem is that for the Oedipus sequence, costume designer Janna Cresswell has put Villers in a ridiculous purple and gold toga that’s supposed to evoke the grandeur of ancient Greece but instead looks like John Belushi in *Animal House* crossed with Liberace. It’s a fatal blow. Villers delivers Sophocles’ lines about the inescapability of fate without too much sawing of the air, but he can hardly be expected to achieve tragic eminence when he’s draped in a gaudy eyesore of a bathrobe. (Villers’ opening lines, ironically, are about the ugliness of a spear-carrier’s knees. Didn’t anyone think to put Oedipus in a simple floor-length white toga?) ...

*Exits* isn’t entirely a failure. The play’s best exchange arrives after intermission in a debate over the value of political theater. The argument grows heated, with Abdallah pacing about on behalf of brotherhood and Villers practically laughing in his face, stating with assurance that all that white people in 1961 want are nice escapist comedies. Abdallah squats before his mentor, Villers leans over in his chair, and the two men grasp one another’s wrist, almost sharing a moment of almost-insight — but then, like so much else in *Exits,* the moment’s allowed to dissipate, unexplained and unexamined....

In Villers’ defense, Fugard fires up the pressure cooker: We’re told again and again that the speech we’re about to hear Huguenet deliver was his “most remarkable ever,” or something that sent chills up onlookers’ spines, or for once involved an actor who wasn’t merely watching himself act but was utterly and completely consumed in the emotional complexities of his role.
You try delivering a speech after an introduction like that.
On the featured soliloquies, Villers goes 1 for 3....

Kalensky deserves credit for bringing Interplayers a work of ideas and emotions by one of the world’s most respected dramatists. But *Exits and Entrances* doesn’t connect the actors’ humility with universal appeal, and it isn’t written or acted convincingly enough here to have the inside-baseball appeal for drama fans that a life-in-the-theater play should have. Interplayers’ *Exits* should be counted as a failed experiment.

*** For the rest of this review, please pick up a copy of Thursday's Pacific NW Inlander (Oct. 23 '08 issue).

*Exits and Entrances* at Interplayers

with Damon Abdallah as the Playwright and Maynard Villers as Andre
runs Oct. 16-Nov. 1
directed by Karen Kalensky

Athol Fugard's somewhat autobiographical script retells encounters in 1951 and 1956 between a young, idealistic South African playwright (unnamed, but clearly Fugard) and Andre Huguenet (known as "the Olivier of South Africa")

world premiere in L.A., July 2004; N.Y. premiere in April 2007