Through Oct 17.
Requiem for a Heavyweight Theater Schmeater
Through Oct 30.
Aunt Dan and Lemon Theater Unlocked at Penny Cafe
Through Oct 23.
It's hard to fathom why ACT is mounting a production of Good Boys, a topical play written in the wake of the 1999 Columbine shootings, only now, in the middle of election season 2004. This October, public discussion of weapons is far more likely to concern the flawed analysis of aluminum tubes or Moktada al-Sadr's rocket-propelled grenades than angry suburban kids with rifles. If we're talking guns at all, it's to refer to the antics of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which last week voted to rescind most of the gun-control laws in the decidedly urban Washington, D.C.
It may sound crass, but I have trouble getting worked up about a few privileged adolescents gunning each other down when our military is training thousands of soldiers--many of them barely older than the infamous school shooters--to use far deadlier weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. War puts small hysterias in perspective.
Directed by Jon Jory, and written by the pseudonymous Jane Martin (who is, if not identical to Jory, then his very close associate), Good Boys is a moderately successful production of an irrelevant play. In a decrepit Florida park, the fathers of a school shooter (gay) and one of his victims (black) meet years later to discuss grief, God, and public acts of contrition. The fathers, played by a bristly Jeffrey Hayenga and a jaw-worrying Thomas Jefferson Byrd, are more or less compelling. But their dead sons, who occasionally pop out of the foliage to reenact their last moments, or an episode of mutual cruelty, are merely opaque. We see how changeable Michael Scott's proto-serial killer is, but his rage is hardly perceptible. Dennis Mosley, playing the victim, has an easier time of it, but his character is cardboard too. Every time the kids appear, the emotional tension between their fathers slackens. The audience has to fall back on a reserve of sympathy for a handful of deaths in the '90s--and last Thursday, after I'd watched an hour of the presidential debate, my sympathy was in awfully short supply.
Neither is timeliness a big priority at Theater Schmeater, where Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight opened last week. Schmeater is big on Serling--another pair of its creepy adaptations of Twilight Zone episodes opens this week--but this teleplay doesn't have creepiness to recommend it. It's about a retired prizefighter named Mountain (Jim Gall), who at 35 is still dependant on the manipulative handlers who raised him from the ninth grade. The main conflict turns on whether he will strike out on his own or submit to a humiliating turn as a pro-wrestler. (The horror!) Gall is appropriately pathetic, but the production is riddled with little problems. The actors have a terrible time finding their lights and the static blocking means that no matter where you're seated along the thrust stage, every character will deliver at least one speech facing away from you. Tina La Plant is fine in some roles, but when she plays the mother of a boxer, it's painful to listen to her awkwardly lilt her way toward an Irish accent. Given these difficulties, it's hardly a surprise that the plot feels dated.
Like Martin's and Serling's works, Wallace Shawn's 1985 play Aunt Dan and Lemon is about the botched rearing of a vulnerable child. Unlike those plays, however, Aunt Dan and Lemon resonates chillingly with today's political crosswinds. Oxford tutor Aunt Dan (a less than overwhelming Katy Kingsbery) worships Henry Kissinger, and she has contempt for Lemon's mother (the stand-out Courtney Lewin), who dares to suggest that people have the right to criticize foreign policy on humanistic grounds. Meanwhile, Dan exerts a powerful influence on 11-year-old Lemon (Alyssa Kay, only marginally eerie), who dines disastrously on tales of power and glamour in lieu of food. Despite the source material, this production is wan. The Penny Cafe is cramped and the lighting options are inflexible. Kingsbery's halting phrasing extends what ought to be glib monologues to unnecessary lengths, and bland performances from the rest of the cast squander the script's high stakes.
