OK, class dismissed. Your assignment is to catch Undermain's production of Wallpaper Psalm and decide for yourself if twentysomething theatrical tinkerer Ruth Margraff's "hysteric and electric operetta" is a pretentious hill of psychosexual beans or a stonework monument to unspoken, sometimes unacknowledged fears of family and sexual rivalry jutting out of our collective unconscious. For me, the play rippled--with intermittent pauses of awkward stillness--mostly because Margraff and Undermain director Katherine Owens have made certain that script and production remain firmly entrenched in the love-hate relationship between two very different sisters. These sisters are the echoing center, but there are all kinds of interwoven themes that keep popping up like patterns on the lacework collars of their dresses--global war, the unpredictability of electricity, the birth and death of Christ, romantic jealousy, the sorrows of birth and bodily decay--that are positioned just close enough to our primal fears to leave an uneasy tingling as they brush past us in the fast, furious parade of this show's wordplay. Yet despite the best efforts of two talented leads, tingling is the sum achievement of this rambling production. That's disappointing, since a show that features such brutal confrontations and gut declarations should have its hands all over you like a disrespectful first date. Light petting is our reward instead, with the burn of passion behind the play's touch only dimly experienced.
Lighting designer Bryan Miller has knocked three pitches in a row straight out of the Undermain park. A longtime collaborator with 11th Street Theatre Project, Miller's last two projects with Undermain--The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite and Therese Raquin--glowed with the kind of expressionistic ardor and despair that perfectly accentuate the faces and voices of the actors in Wallpaper Psalm. Whether streaming dim bluish city streetlights through the big windows of the apartment of aged Chaucia (Kateri Cale) or golden leaf-patterned sun on Chaucia and Sissy (Rhonda Boutte) as they stroll in separate scenes with lover Robert (Spencer Driggers), Miller remains vividly inside the heads of these moribund siblings, which is a pretty dangerous place, as Margraff's script unfolds in a series of interlocked scenarios whose reality is always subject to question. At the play's opening, Chaucia returns to her apartment building nursing a mouth injury whose cause she can't articulate. Decorous and judgmental, she awaits with trepidation the arrival of her sister, boisterous and bullying even in the late stages of bone cancer. Robert, their smooth-talking paramour, resurfaces from their pasts as the apartment's sarcastic concierge and comes between them yet again. But he's not the only man in their lives. The perpetrator (Nick Brisco) is both thug and electrician, a man who gains entry to Chaucia's apartment in some pretty unconventional ways and sets up a terror inside her that's the result of either real threat or frail, old-age paranoia. In the end, the sisters are reduced to creaky physical conflict when a long-awaited man comes knocking at the door.
Kateri Cale and Rhonda Boutte are never less than satisfying in Wallpaper Psalm, although Boutte's gifts are mostly expended as perpetual cutup while Cale takes the prim straight-woman role and fashions a truly touching figure from it. Both are also encouraged to exercise their fine voices through the songs, with lyrics by Margraff and an almost entirely original electronic composition from Undermain's artistic associate Cameron Cobb. Unfortunately, much of the vocalizations called for by Margraff and director Owens are pure distractions that derail us from the dreamy, nocturnal choo-choo course of the show. This seems more true for Spencer Driggers and Dallas-based musician Nick Brisco; the latter is given the thankless task of grunting a drum-thrashing rant called "Radio Spider Demon" that brings the proceedings to a sudden, wheel-squealing halt just as suspense has begun to build.
What's deceptive is calling this show an "operetta"--you might even go so far as to call this a self-deception on the author's part. Margraff was surely being ironic using that word in the subtitle, as it usually refers to the frothiest, most deliriously romantic operas Italy has produced. But there's the creeping sense that what might've been a little bait and switch on the playwright's part for fellowship, grant, and workshop purposes gained a head of steam that eventually clouded her vision. Margraff said up front she was messing with the shape of a 17th-century European stage form (How ambitious! How fund-worthy!), perhaps knowing she would then deliver nothing more than a play with songs--and half of those are self-conscious at best, extraneous at worst. At some point, was Margraff herself so enamored with coupling "operetta" with the half-rhyme adjectives "electric and hysteric" that she eventually convinced herself that she was pouring vintage wine into a wacky, modern new bottle? Not so fast. Wallpaper Psalm is a discordant musical with pretensions that sometimes succeed, although ultimately at the expense of what might've been a purer, more potent shock from the brain's memory synapses if Margraff had rocked steady on her voyage into the great storm-tossed ocean of sibling vagaries. As it is now, Undermain actors and audience spend too much time dumping unnecessary cargo to get there.
Wallpaper Psalm runs through February 14. Call (214) 747-5515.
Banter
Beastie girl
We turn now from a chaotic nightmare play to a tight and traditional fable with a witty heart. Lean Theater's spry and very funny production of Lloyd's Prayer, about to enter its final weekend at the basement space in Theatre Three known as Theatre Too, skews reality too, but the purely imaginative complications that bedevil the misfits in this show were conceived to teach us a moral. Kevin Kling's script borrows a heroine from the "feral child" legend (infant raised by animals) of many countries as well as characters and situations from the Old Testament, then jazzes them up with the kind of one-liners with which playwright Paul Rudnick, when playing Hollywood script doctor, supports his antique-furniture habit. There are jabs at pop feminism, infomercials, daytime magazine shows, and televangelism. It all culminates in a gentle-hearted, occasionally foul-mouthed affirmation that, well, if you have a Beast Girl in your life, let her know you love her.
Indeed, the parallel between Bobbi the Beast Girl (Nance Watkins), raised from infancy by raccoons, and our own occasional beastliness to our friends and lovers is drawn explicitly by Lloyd P. Jones (Thurman Moss), a recently paroled ex-con turned preacher. "You want to look away, because when you look at Bobbi, you see yourselves," he snarls dramatically to the crowd that assembles to see his tent revival with Bobbi peering pitifully out from a cage.
This wandering opportunist had accidentally discovered the raccoon girl, whose limited vocabulary comes from imitating words she's heard from Martha (Mary Lyons) and Henry (Marc Hebert), the couple who've taken her in and cared for her. Their passionless marriage has led Henry to pay rather more attention to their dog Princess than is healthy, neglecting his wife and the Beast Girl. Bobbi, who makes people scream when they see her (95 percent of her body is covered with hair) and has a taste for human flesh, travels on the evangelical circuit with Lloyd in an arrangement so grossly exploitative, the Angel of the Lord (Lyons again) must swoop down and intervene with threats from a plague-and-pestilence-prone angry God.
Lloyd's Prayer has been staged often across the country since it premiered back at the Humana Festival in 1988, but even if some of the targets in this play have since been filled full of holes in popular satire's shooting gallery, the script revives your interest with sheer cleverness. After wearily recounting the long list of factors he can't discriminate against in this age of minority-protection policies, a boss (Hebert) declares to Bobbi as she applies for a job, "We've got goat boys and sheep women out there. We don't like it, but it's the law."
And Lean Theater, the company steered by Theatre Three regulars Thurman Moss and Sharon Bunn currently gearing up to schedule full seasons again, maintains that interest with a very appealing cast who understand comic timing under director William Peyton. The company's title says it all--this is theater of frugal means but wicked methods. I can't imagine it being funnier if they'd trained a real dog, or hired a puppeteer, or designed a prop to portray Princess, the beloved pooch of Bobbi's adoptive father--as is, Marc Hebert coos and frolics with an imaginary animal and supplies its excited yip-yip-yips himself between his dialogue.
As Bobbi the Beast Girl, Nance Watkins does a marvelous job of conveying a wide variety of emotions through the scrim of a furry, nocturnal scavenger's sensibility: Even without the raccoon stripe across her face, she has eyes like some night creature, so brown they're black and reflecting stage lights as well as cunning. Mary Lyons has a marvelous monologue she delivers by Bobbi's cage, peeling potatoes and predicting the furry girl's trajectory from disappointing prom night to lesbianism. Lean Theater's Lloyd's Prayer is wry but never bitchy, and just compassionate enough to make the meringue sentiments melt in your mouth before they can give you diabetes.
Lloyd's Prayer runs through February 13. Call (214) 871-3300.
