Bowing at the Feet at of Uptown Players' Divine Sister, Plus a Breakdown of Bath House's FIT

Comments (0) By Elaine Liner Thursday, Jul 19 2012

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In 20 vignettes, some just one word in length, the play has the couple play out scenes from their marriage. It's The Honeymooners filtered through East Coast elitist attitudes. It's a vaudeville-style series of blackouts depicting swallowed emotions amid rapier thrusts of personal insults.

"Do you suppose stuffing it in me is something I enjoy?" says the wife when the husband is offstage. "Do you? Putting it in me like a wad of dough, hoping it'll rise to the occasion?"

Mike Morgan

Nun funnier: Mary-Margarett Pyeatt as Timmy and Coy Covington as Mother Superior hit it out of the park in Uptown Players' The Divine Sister.

Details

The Divine Sister

Continues through July 29 at Kalita Humphreys Theater. Call 214-219-2718.

Festival of Independent Theatres

Continues through August 4 at the Bath House Cultural Center. Call 800-617-6904.

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Nobody does absurdist wit with the whiplash bite of Albee. Hard to imagine this one done better than the way these actors and this director are doing it.

One Thirty Productions' entry at FIT is a misstep, a rare one from this company whose niche is finding snazzy little scripts that say something to audiences of the age that remembers D-Day but is still with it enough to Tweet the grandkids.

Making Contact, by celebrity biographer Patricia Bosworth, is a 1990 one-act that feels as dated as a Matlock episode. Recently widowed older writer Polly (Gene Raye Price) is being photographed in her dingy New York sublet by a one-time big-deal shooter named Abner (Jason Leyva). The guy's a troll in grungy jeans, bragging about how he once hung out with Vidal and Mailer at Elaine's, the iconic Manhattan bar. He spends more time name-dropping than checking his light meter, fumbling his cameras like an amateur (or maybe that's just the under-rehearsed actor). Abner's energy is middle-aged Richard Dreyfuss, over-caffeinated, unshaven and rude.

Yadda, yadda, Abner makes Polly strip down to her bra. She cries and he leaves. You won't like him or this talky, dull little play. FIT is designed to allow small companies like One Thirty to take chances with different material. But this one just doesn't fit the bill.