Audio By Carbonatix
Dumb Show is the “small, light show” Joe Penhall wanted to
write after the “big, dark show” Blue/Orange. The Promethean
Theatre has always been better at darkness, so its successful
Blue/Orange four years ago was no surprise. I am delighted to
announce, however, that it has now dispatched both Penhall joints
brilliantly.
I originally wrote masterfully instead of brilliantly,
but masterful is the wrong word for something as fast and crazy
as Dumb Show — an excellent play with a dubious premise,
for which Promethean’s three actors compensate with a balls-to-the-wall
manic energy that leaves an audience with little time for critical
thought. In the play’s first moment, a man and woman we will come to
know as Greg and Liz nervously prepare to answer a knocking at the door
of a plush, chocolate-brown hotel room, with their eyes fairly bugging
out of their sockets and their hands all atwitch, as though they were
standing in an electrified puddle. From then until the curtain drops,
these actors seem interested, first of all, in shocking, titillating,
and amusing themselves. Doing the same to the audience seems like a
happy side effect.
The man doing the knocking is Barry (Gregg Weiner), a television
star who’s visiting Greg and Liz (David Sirlois and Promethean’s own
executive artistic director, Deborah L. Sherman) to see about doing
some banking. Which doesn’t mean Greg and Liz are bankers. They’re not.
Barry just thinks they are. (And yes, I’m saying too much about what
ought to be a very shocking revelation, but it’s impossible to speak
about this play for 1,000 words without doing so: The revelation comes
about halfway through act one, and only afterward does the play’s real
subject matter become clear.) In fact, Greg and Liz are tabloid
journalists. They have tricked Barry into coming here, getting drunk,
and revealing seamy details about his life, marriage, and chemical
habits. They hope to use these confessions as leverage to persuade
Barry to give them a tell-all interview that will earn them a shit-ton
of money and considerable renown.
This is the aforementioned dubious premise, which, to be fair,
playwright Penhall seems to acknowledge by having Barry rave about
entrapment every few minutes. Which doesn’t exactly explain why it’s
not entrapment. When we New Times people interview
somebody, we’re not even allowed to mislead them as to the nature of
the story we’re writing. Failing to mention that we’re writing a story
at all would get us fired, sued, and probably beaten up by our
scandalized colleagues.
Still, though: This is set in England, where in the early ’90s, a
tabloid had no reservations about claiming that Elton John liked to
slit his puppies’ vocal cords. Still, though: That same tabloid
had its pants sued off. So Penhall’s got a credibility problem.
Do yourself a favor and ignore it. This is easy, especially once
Barry finds out about the subterfuge. Weiner has received every plaudit
a South Florida actor can garner in the past year — a Carbonell,
drooling reviews, an in-print comparison to Zac Efron — but he’s
never deserved them more than he does now. As Barry, he freaks, he
fumes, his eyes become all big and red and scary, and his very
skeleton seems to grow into a vast hulking hunk of hot-breathed
rage as he bears down on little David Sirlois (who isn’t really little
but sure looks that way next to the molten Weinenator). He’s just a
gigantic, coked-up monster. Yet… he’s likable.
He’s likable primarily because of the contrast he cuts with his
fellow characters. Greg and Liz speak exclusively in banalities. In
their world, people are given a “new lease on life” or “a second
chance”; people “have their ups and downs,” and the deceased “look down
from above.” (Clearly, Greg and Liz work for the dailies.) Barry,
meanwhile, speaks like a real person. Describing the innate human need
to imbibe intoxicants, he says, “Humans need alternate reality like
whales need a blowhole.” Or, about fucking: “Sex is God’s way of saying
‘sorry.’ ” These observances, coupled with Weiner’s fireball
histrionics, make Barry into a Shakespearean tragedy loosed on a world
of cartoons.
I don’t say this to besmirch the other actors — they’re
supposed to be cartoons. (Sirlois in particular, when unmasked
as a villain, looks about ready to drop an Acme anvil on Weiner’s
head.) The subject of Penhall’s critique is the popular media’s failure
of imagination and how it dries out our human capacity for empathy.
Sherman, as Liz, really looks like she’s trying to be solicitous when
she asks Weiner if he thinks a deceased loved one is “looking down from
above.” But there is a peculiar genius to Sherman’s acting in that
moment and in so many others: She looks like she’s groping for even
these obvious words, and after saying them, she looks unsatisfied. It’s
as though she knows there’s something more profound she means to say
but isn’t sure there’s any language to express it. (This scene is
eerily similar to a scene in the movie American Psycho, when
Chloe Sevigny flirts with Christian Bale as Bale selects a weapon with
which to dispatch her. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sherman used it as a
model.)
We’ll be hearing more of Penhall’s name this fall, when his movie
adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road hits theaters. The
Road follows a man and a boy through a post-apocalyptic wasteland
in which there are no plants, no animals, and very few people and in
which the only available food are those canned goods stored in
unpillaged basements. At least in book form, it is a work without
clichés: In a world where nothing exists, there are no subjects
to which a cliché might affix itself. If Penhall can pack half
as much feeling into The Road‘s silence as he can into Dumb
Show‘s banalities, it will be something to see.
