Over the Cabinet and Down the Drain

Local playwright and fabulist Bret Fetzer loves his fairy
tales—flights of fancy, whimsical character names, adventure plus
a moral, and sometimes a talking household object.

His new Blind Spot, cowritten with Juliet Waller Pruzan (who is also
a dancer and choreographer), sticks to the Fetzer playbook: A neglected
8-year-old named Kirsty Vanderkamp explores her house, creating a radio
documentary of her adventures. She hangs out with dust-bunny
farmers—including a lovelorn boy named Iota Potts and the
ungrateful object of his affections, Aura Rotter—under the bed.
She visits a burlesque club in the fridge. She sits around with nasty
journalists who run a gossip magazine out of the china cabinet called
Dish. She ascends to a Scientology-like cult in the bathroom light
fixture, whose members say things like: “It’s not enough to wipe the
smudge from the glass. To truly see clear, you must clean the finger of
its oil and filth!”

The story dives high and low, from the light fixture to the slimy
water pipes, following Aura’s long journey to becoming a jaded,
world-weary adventurer and Iota’s increasingly sad attempts to find her
and woo her back home. The ensemble—including Jennifer Pratt as
Vanderkamp and Alissa Mortensen as Aura—is clearly enjoying
itself, playing dozens of broad American caricatures from the wheezy
old stripper to the itinerant preacher, and singing a few
gospel-country songs by Rick Miller.

The digressions into the secret life of the Vanderkamp house are
imaginative and fun, but Blind Spot is almost all digressions without a
strong center of narrative gravity: Subplots sprawl in all directions,
and while we know Vanderkamp falls into this fantasia to escape the
frustrating banality of her real life, tighter corollaries between the
two worlds would’ve made for a richer psychic landscape.

And, at over two and a half hours, falling through one looking glass
after another eventually loses its charm. By part four, when the Potts
family is turning in on itself in some battle between the slave trade
and an underground railroad in the household pipes (where bee stingers
are the weapon of choice), the whole endeavor loses steam. The play
reinvents the house in a childlike way as a rich, surprising place and
satirizes all kind of adults, from the poor devout to the filthy rich.
But less, in this case, would be more.