The difficulty of capturing profundity--or, at least, avoiding the outright superficial--with brevity rapping the dramatist's knuckles like a crazed nun is illustrated in Death Defying Acts, a trio of short plays given its Southwest premiere by Theatre Three. Elaine May, author of the center piece and a confirmed master of the farcical situation ever since she and fellow sketch artist Mike Nichols stormed New York's John Golden Theatre in 1960, brought her good friends David Mamet and Woody Allen together to form this triumvirate of comedies about mortality and the way it heightens regret, disappointment, and betrayal. Death Defying Acts didn't enjoy a very long New York run, possibly owing to the fact that that city's theatergoers can be choosy about their Mamet and May selections. None of these one-acts features the dramatist at the height of his or her powers--and, in one case, there's an awful lot of wheel-spinning with an old hand at the controls--but there are enough pleasures scattered throughout these winding, well-trodden garden paths to warrant your attention. Given that the production lasts three hours with a 15- minute intermission, your feet (or, speaking unmetaphorically, your bottom) will feel the journey.
Much of the evening's enjoyment can be derived from watching Theatre Three veterans Sharon Bunn and Thurman Moss go to town with their showy roles. Having been involved with Theatre Three since the '70s, they both give what you might call star-vehicle performances--pleasurable because the roles they carry are high-sheen, flattering, so-familiar-they're-relaxing kinds of roles. Neither brow betrays a drop of sweat in the function of some occasionally frenetic farce.
Moss stars in the first show, David Mamet's The Interview, in which he plays what has come to be considered an anomaly in a world full of defense attorney-as-media spokesperson: a nervous lawyer. He sits at one end of a long table in low lights, directly opposite a stubborn, caustic, impatient interviewer (Ambre Low) with an upswept, Terry Gilliamesque hairdo. The lawyer explains in elaborate legalese an event involving a lawn mower that the interviewer keeps calling him on. As directed by Kerry Cole, who helmed New Theatre Company's hit production of Psychopathia Sexualis, this slight but effective Mamet piece has a sinister, slinkier rhythm to it than did John Patrick Shanley's pre-marital comedy. Moss is terrific, growing more desperate with his circumlocution in the presence of her unmoved stare. The Interview amounts to a 45-minute lawyer joke in duet, so unconcerned is the playwright with anything but one sweeping career slander. Yet he stabs with a surgeon's precision, and it occurs to you while the following one-acts loiter here and there that May and Allen might have used some Mametian streamlining.
Thurman Moss becomes director for Elaine May's Hotline, which possesses more soul even when it loiters because the two central characters here often convey their sadness in the quieter moments. Sharon Bunn gives the best of her two performances as an actress who's decided to kill herself, but will give life one more shot if the folks at the Manhattan Suicide Center can supply a good reason for her to. She's less melodramatic than wearily fermenting. In a nihilistic mood of regal pissiness, she berates telephone operators and suicide "counselors" alike. In explaining why she called one operator "an asshole Puerto Rican," she defends herself to another: "I didn't say the operator was an asshole because he was a Puerto Rican, I said he was an asshole and a Puerto Rican. As in, you're an asshole and you're not Puerto Rican. Get it?"
Bunn encounters an earnest, fragile first-time phone "counselor" (Terry Dobson) who, unfortunately, has previously experienced a success. He's now ready to save the world, which might not be as difficult a project as saving this bitterly angry caller who, we learn, has pretty much already decided to overdose. She castigates him anyway, and triggers a desperate phone-bank campaign by the distraught counselor to get her back on the line.
Playing the obsessed Samaritan, Terry Dobson doesn't quite overcome the strange achievement he's earned with this critic--the ability to seem woefully miscast in every role I've seen him perform. An equity actor, as well as Theatre Three's musical director and the conductor-arranger for Turtle Creek Chorale's Encore! ensemble, the presence of Dobson on stage has always struck me as a kind of familial concession--he's an 18-year member of the oft-embattled T3 clan. Still, Hotline found me laughing harder at his spastic dilemmas and wondering less why he wasn't spending more time in musical direction.
Woody Allen's Central Park West, directed by Bruce Coleman, is the program's most frustrating fare--the longest (or so it seemed), the most gimmicky (even compared to Mamet's, which didn't reveal its gimmick till the punch line)--but it's full of enough profane bitchery to keep us diverted. Sharon Bunn plays an affluent psychoanalyst who makes an emergency call to a dear friend (Cindee Mayfield) to reveal shocking information: the psychoanalyst's husband (Thurman Moss) is leaving her for another woman. Fairly predictable layers of infidelity involving the friend's husband (Terry Dobson) and a bushy-tailed student (Ambre Low) are peeled away.
Confronting another with their betrayal--and phrasing that confrontation as witheringly as possible--is Allen's device here, and its bruising repetition finally wears us down. Allen's recent scripts have grown increasingly leaden with constant affirmations of what he first articulated in Bullets Over Broadway as the right of the artist to create "his own moral universe." Frankly, I don't care what moral universe Allen resides in, as long as it legislates less axe-grinding and wittier insight. Central Park West tickles us with an assembly line of devilish disses, but we're ultimately irked by the pedestrian domesticity of these tony, cocktail-fueled turmoils, inflated only by the playwright's contempt.
The highlight of Central Park West is Cindee Mayfield as the psychoanalyst's smarmy, sycophantic friend. Although a sinner as surely as the rest, she is the most defenseless character in Allen's script, the object of vitriolic attack from almost every corner. Mayfield inhabits her role perhaps more fully than does any other actor in this program, and from her initial, delicate Manolo Blahnik-heeled strolls across the set to her placating explanations to hoarse, wild-haired protests, she bravely and skillfully bears this infidel down a sinkhole of humiliation. Watching Mayfield come apart at the seams is harrowing and hilarious, and reveals far more about Allen's increasingly creepy misanthropy than about his talents as a farceur.
Death Defying Acts runs through August 23. Call 871-3300.
Banter
"When it rains, it pours," declares Cora Cardona, artistic director of Teatro Dallas. Her company is currently getting drenched with bad luck, having lost expected corporate grant money because of across-the-board cuts in arts donations and facing homelessness in July 1999 when the Delaware company that owns the Teatro space takes it back.
"At this point, we've heard we're either going to be a gas station or an office space to supervise the development," Cardona says wearily.
She and managing director Valerie Brogan, "out of desperation," came up with a last-minute plan for some sustaining cash. Every weekday in August, from noon to 1 p.m., Teatro Dallas will host lunchtime readings, lectures, films, and performances. For $12, you get a show and some speciality like a tortas (Mexican sub). Bring your own lunch, and for $6 you get the show.
"All the Mondays are taken by Venezuelan harpist Carlos Guedes. The Tuesdays are three scenes from a revenge comedy called A Rose By Any Other Name, which was a box-office hit for us. Wednesdays we will screen a documentary made by Jeff [Hurst, her husband and Teatro co-founder] and myself called Frida Kahlo: A Ribbon Around the Bomb, in which I play Frida. Thursdays, August 6 and 13, we will re-perform a wonderful monologue called The Gay Little Immigrant That Could; Friday August 7, we will perform Pizcas (Harvesting), a piece about a Mexican-American migrant worker; Friday August 14, Conte de Loyo will be doing the flamenco. The remaining days will likely be scheduled with talks."
Cardona and company have also extended their feelers to find a new performance space, which, Cardona insists, they will build from the ground up if necessary (I can picture Cardona laying bricks before we finish our conversation).
"For many performing artists in America right now, struggle is the nature of the beast," Cardona says. "And that's too bad. You hear that the economy is healthy now, yet among many corporations, support of the arts runs dead last among charitable donations."
Teatro lunch performances run weekdays August 3-31. Call 741-1135.
