Hate Is Bad

Hate is bad: There is nothing wrong with David Gow’s Cherry Docs
that a complete rewrite by someone with talent couldn’t fix.

How’s this for a threadbare idea? Take two people who seem, at least on
the front end, to be opposites in every imaginable way. Now place them in an
arena where they are forced to deal with one another until both parties
discover that when you get right down to it they aren’t so different after
all. Awwwww. This well-known formula, which has served everyone from the
mighty Neil Simon to the many nameless authors of untold made-for-TV movies,
is the essence of Cherry Docs, a ponderous one-act play about a bright,
superficially charming skinhead turned murderer and the bright, superficially
charming Jewish attorney who defends him. What do we learn? Why, that we all
have the capacity for hate, of course. And especially that neo-Nazi skinheads,
who kick people from various ethnic backgrounds in the head with steel-toed
Doc Martens until their brains splatter on the ground, are people too. They
can change for the better. Awwww.

The biggest problem with Cherry Docs, which has been noted by just
about every critic since the show was originally produced, is that the
majority of the action takes place behind the scenes and in many cases
involves vague characters we never actually meet and whose motives we can
never begin to understand. It’s all talk, talk, talk and no do. The
“gritty” story is almost entirely narrated by two 2-D characters via
monotonous soliloquies that drag on forever and which too often stray far
afield from the matter at hand. When Danny the lawyer (an unusually stodgy
Jeffrey Lamer) and Mike the skinhead (a predictably ornery Steven Burk) do
encounter one another for the play’s few dramatic moments, they either read
over depositions or exchange tart barbs like “I hate you.” “Oh,
yeah? Well I hate you too.” The good-hearted skinhead’s eventual
conversion to a life of tolerance and understanding is entirely
unbelievable.

Jackie Nichols’ set, an exercise in bare necessity, is the best thing the
show has going for it. It’s too bad the actors, who, to be fair, are doing the
best they can, given the hack material, have to come out and spoil it.

Cherry Docs is at TheatreWorks through January 20th.

Your cheatin’ heart: Pinter’s Betrayal is well-acted but wanting
at Theatre Memphis.

Though it is chronologically fractured, Betrayal, Harold Pinter’s
1978 one-act about the collapse of an extramarital affair, is one of the
celebrated English writer’s least innovative pieces. But the fat-free dialogue
of Betrayal, arranged like a modern cello quartet, makes it one of his
most enduring. Over time the play becomes less about who did what to whom and
more about who knew who did what to whom and when they knew it.

After a nearly decade-long hiatus, Mary Margaret Walker, née Guth,
makes a notable return to the Memphis boards as an ambitious dealer of modern
art who wants to have her cake and sleep with it too. The bratty adulteress
isn’t the least bit torn between her philandering but otherwise conservative
publisher husband (played to the extra-dry hilt by Tony Isbell) and his best
friend, the philandering if somewhat more progressive publisher lover (the
always affable Barclay Roberts). In fact, it’s not clear that she actually
wants either of them nearly as much as she wants to just have things her way.
The result is an intriguing and often amusing game of Indian poker where
nobody stands a chance of winning.

The clever set, a series of flat, square platforms painted red, blue, and
yellow to simulate a Mondrian painting, has not been put to its best use. The
pieces break apart and rotate to create a number of varied playing spaces,
theoretically eliminating any need to move furniture about. Unfortunately,
director Ted Strickland (making his first foray into directing after taking
over the helm at Theatre Memphis) has his actors leave the stage between each
and every scene and wastes valuable time fussing with the set dressing. With a
space this versatile and mobile, no actor (save the bartender) ever needs to
leave the stage. The various pieces could, with only a bit of consideration,
be broken apart and recombined with the actors still on board, shaving a great
deal of time off the performance and upping the dramatic stakes immeasurably.
Incorporating the scene shifts into the show by turning the characters into
living chess pieces would be far more interesting for the audience than
pretending not to see the stagehands bumbling around in the dark during
lengthy breaks in the action. The play, far too subtle to endure so many
momentum-wrecking blackouts, is saved only by the extreme competence of its
strong cast.

Betrayal is at the Little Theatre, Theatre Memphis through January
26th.

A comedy of errors: Sleeping Cat’s got it; doesn’t know how to use
it.

If it could go wrong, it did go wrong at Sleeping Cat Studio’s opening of
David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Doors got stuck, lines got flubbed,
and hapless audience members returning from the bathroom suddenly found
themselves stranded in the middle of a play they never rehearsed. Yup, it was
a disaster — but one with great potential for turning itself around.

Sleeping Cat’s spanking-new theater space is a nice one, but it has some
problems which need to be solved. Seats aren’t on risers yet so it’s tough to
see the action if you aren’t down front. There’s also quite an echo in the
uninsulated former garage and it renders actors with less than impeccable
diction absolutely unintelligible. Sadly enough, only Sleeping Cat’s heaviest
hitter, Rick Crowe (in the role of super-salesman Rick Roma), had the skills
to consistently overcome such unfortunate acoustics.

Rick Moore (Moss), a seasoned stage vet who can, with the aid of an
attentive director, be quite formidable in the right roles and pretty darn
good in the wrong ones, spent the evening engaged in garbled histrionics that
were cartoonishly over the top, while a mush-mouthed Jim Esposito (Levine)
managed to be rather sympathetic in spite of being thoroughly
unintelligible.

It was clear that second-time Glengarry director Amy Van Doren
paid not a lick of attention to the all-important rhythms of this language-
driven play, which, when done correctly, is as precise as an atomic clock.
Instead, this black comedy about the horrible costs of being a winner (or
“closer,” as the case may be) was staged as a series of erratic
ejaculations splayed across a seemingly simple set that over time transformed
itself into an impassible obstacle course for the struggling actors, who, in
spite of everything, kept slugging away like champs.

Though this meaty play was served up a little too rare, Sleeping Cat
Studio is a versatile space where a fledgling company can learn and grow. If
the company can attract more actors of Crowe’s caliber by selecting plays like
Glengarry and Quills, they might prove to be players yet.

Glengarry Glen Ross is at Sleeping Cat Studio through February
2nd.