Blue Surge
Bad Monkey Productions
at the Chamber Theater
Through Oct 20.
Playwright Rebecca Gilman has a taste for the repulsive. Boy
Gets Girl is about a stalker who financially and socially ruins
his victim. Spinning into Butter is named after a Little Black
Sambo story. The Glory of Living, a finalist for the 2002
Pulitzer Prize, is about a husband and wife who rape and murder young
girls in motel rooms.
Compared to that cavalcade of ugliness, Blue Surge is
almost a comedy. In fact, it is a comedy, even though it
concerns an underage prostitute, a breakup, and a cop who can’t stop
thinking about anal sex. It begins in a brothel on the night of a
sting. A sweet, nervous undercover cop named Curt (the charming Andrew
Clawson) can’t get Sandy (Brenda Joyner) to do anything besides massage
his back. His worldlier—if slightly stupider—partner Doug
(Robert Walker) makes the bust, which is later thrown out on a
technicality. Sandy and her friend Heather (the lewder, funnier
prostitute, played by Alyssa Keene) go free. But the cops and the
hookers start to hang out: Curt encourages Sandy to get a legal job;
Doug and Heather begin a sweetly ribald courtship.
The production, by new company Bad Monkey, bears a few amateur
blemishes (uneven pacing, actorly tics), but they don’t ruin the
pleasure of watching Gilman’s funny, flawed characters circle each
other and awkwardly negotiate their desires. Sandy wants love, Curt
wants to love, Heather wants a man who can keep up with her, and Doug
just wants to try anal sex. BRENDAN KILEY
Million Dollar Quartet
Village Theatre
Through Oct 28.
One December evening in 1956, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins played
a jam session with, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sun Records’ hottest new
acquisition. Johnny Cash stopped by to pose for photos because Sam
Phillips, Sun’s P. T. Barnumesque president, had invited a reporter.
The impromptu four-man supergroup would never meet again.
Million Dollar Quartet is a dramatization of that night,
and despite some dramatic tarting-up—Elvis’s girlfriend (Jessica
Skerritt) sings a couple songs and gives a painful speech referring to
rock ‘n’ roll as a “revolution”—it captures the significance of
that night. All four men were about to experience the costs of
unprecedented fame: Perkins was fading into obscurity after being
eclipsed by Elvis, Cash would soon sign a lucrative contract with
Columbia Records, Lewis was on the verge of becoming the world’s most
popular rock star before losing it all by marrying his 13-year-old
cousin, and Presley had just made the first of many atrocious movies
and was about to embark on a two-decade descent into weirdness,
self-loathing, and perversion.
The performances are excellent. The actors mimic each musician’s
signature tics—Rob Lyons does Perkins’s odd guitar-playing
chicken walk, Lance Guest’s Cash lifts his guitar over his
head—but it’s more than impersonator shtick. The actors are a
good ensemble and a fine band, and though their instruments keep them
primarily rooted in place, they find room for fun: Lyons plays a hot
guitar solo while standing precariously on an upright bass being played
by another actor.
The unabashed star of the show is Levi Kreis’s Lewis, an arrogant
bastard who revels in his own talent. Kreis’s leg is in a
brace—he threw out his knee in an earlier performance after
vaulting over the piano—but his Southern-fried bravura is still
magnificent. In real life, Lewis is the only surviving member of the
Quartet. Here, too, the Killer gets the last laugh. PAUL CONSTANT
Trick or Treat… Where’s Your Face?
Market Theater
Through Oct 31.
The three-person Blood Squad has a killer conceit, and they can make
any mode of torture, dismemberment, or death seem indefensibly
hilarious. This round of improvised horror flicks is Halloween themed
(hence the title, which is pretty good), but it doesn’t seem much
different from earlier iterations. The audience supplies a slasher-film
title—ours was Night of the Leper—and a
rubber-faced guy (Brendan Felker), a hypnotism enthusiast who
resembles David Cross (Michael White), and a sly girl (Elicia
Wickstead) provide the “movie,” accompanied by a pianist.
There are plenty of great things about Blood Squad. First, there are
the voiceover special effects, which are like Book-It’s compensatory
narration, except demented. (“Her ear smears off her face. Shhhmop.”)
There’s the way the trio pushes back against lame suggestions (dissing
the pianist’s choices without breaking character, mocking the rejected
title Sea Monsters by inserting some harmless, porpoiselike
mutants into the mise-en-scène)—they know when to let the
relentless upbeatness of TheatreSports slide into something more
cynical and culturally aware. And there’s the material itself:
Hormonal, absurd, and shamelessly devoted to its audience’s basest
appetites, slasher flicks were made to be mocked.
The structure of Night of the Leper wasn’t perfect, of
course. The opening scene wasted too much story on characters destined
to become leper fodder; other setups got lost in the accelerating
denouement. But who am I? The improv Nazi? It was funny, it was
gruesome, it was fine. ANNIE WAGNER
