Category: Critique

In her first collection of essays, Joan Didion wrote “Anything worth having has its price.” She didn’t resort to cliches like: “Life isn’t fair,” or “You can have it all.” In her simple, non-judgmental way she summed up a truth that we may have suspected, but carefully avoided confronting. In Big Enough (her one-woman show) Stefany Cambra reveals tough but realistic insights into human endeavors, by sharing crucial aspects of her life thus far.

Cambra begins by entering in brightly colored gym clothes, huffing as she works out for a short spell, then plops herself down to confide in us, and indulge in some “nutritious” work-out treats. Including wine. Her wry sense of humor is definitely one of her strong points. She describes internal debates with self-esteem and body issues. Fair to say this piece comes from the viewpoint of an American woman who will not predicate personal value on her ability to land a man. She does however, listen far too often to that deprecating voice we all entertain: “Is this because I don’t need a spouse, or couldn’t find one if I tried?” Her friends’ attempts to reassure her feel somewhat like consolation platitudes, so she resolves to reshape her body, without making others feel inadequate. This is part of Cambra’s charm. Even when she takes digs, she earnestly respects others feelings.

We follow Stefany as she takes on the ordeals of the Senior Prom, dating while maintaining a palpable, exhilarating commitment to the theatre, dieting and yoga. Like other prolonged, contemporary soliloquies, she strikes a casual tone, connecting with individuals in the audience. We exercise along with her (if we so choose) we listen to her mantras, we are privy to her love/hate affair with The Hallmark Channel. She is genuine and engaging and congenial, without getting perky. Her quirky asides sneak in as she takes us through the ragged, jagged hoops that grown-ups must endure. She plods along in the face of merciless disappointment.

Stefany Cambra’s great strength is her ability to find these hideous aches that go unnoticed or at least without articulation. She recognizes this great, conspiratorial myth that if we’re very, very, careful to live our lives deliberately, and without error, the cosmos will reward us with bliss. That we will never be forced to make painful choices. Cambra could have easily coasted on her warmth, her affability, her intuitive charisma. But instead she chooses into pull us into the raw core of her self-doubt, her confusion, her despair. She doesn’t tell us these things, she enters that realm and includes us, without vanity or shame. She trusts us. And if we trust her, we will be overwhelmed. And stunned.

Proper Hijinx presents Big Enough: the Musings and Misadventures of a Bumblefuck, playing (February 9th-19th, 2017.) The WaterTower Theatre (Studio space). 16560 Addison Road, 75001. 972-450-6241. properhijinx.com

Under the guise of being a jaundiced, seductive, German rock chanteuse (by way of Marlene Dietrich) Hedwig and her band: The Angry Inch, is a singer/songwriter and her life story is a contemporary fairy tale on the finer (and stranger) aspects of gender polarization and how love gone wrong can turn into a train-wreck. Hedwig and The Angry Inch is a trashy, surreal, gender mash-up on the uglier and perhaps also sublime odyssey that compels one to find a soulmate. Hedwig does her shtick, laced with withering, ironic insight, while swinging wide between fierce songs and melancholy ballads. She regales us with autobiographical anecdotes, leading us up to the moment that brought her here, to this stage.

In his younger (pre-chop) days, Hedwig shared a trailer with his mother in Berlin, and slept with his head in the oven. (I know, I know). His pathological mother treats him with indifference and contempt. One day, while sunbathing naked, he catches the attention of a charming, butch Military officer named Luther, who plies him with various candies, including Gummy Bears and Sugar Daddies. It’s not long before Luther proposes, and expresses his desire to take Hedwig to America. To fool the authorities, Luther insists mere drag won’t work, and that Hedwig get a transgender operation. His mother explains that to move ahead, you must leave something behind (Hedwig is nothing if not wildly implausible). Then a clandestine, third-rate surgeon botches the job, forever mutilating him. Luther abandons Hedwig in America; from there she forms a deep connection with a guy name Tommy Speck, writing songs for and tutoring him in the school of the immeasurably cool.

Hedwig gets astonishing trajectory from outlandish spectacle, thanks to Julian Crouch (Scenic Designer) Kevin Adams (Lighting Designer) and Benjamin Percy (Projection Designer). The set is post-apocalyptic, neo-garbage heap, tricked out with dazzling lights and hallucinogenic animation. All the better to boost our crass, egocentric, counter-cultural superstar my dear. Hedwig is a flamboyant pastiche that somehow manages to celebrate and ridicule the eternal, fractured battle between masculine and feminine identities in the cause of romance. Everything in this bizarre cyclone of degeneracy screams it shouldn’t work, and yet it does. It’s a pyrotechnical, confounding, inexplicably moving rush. As if Fassbinder and Baz Luhrman had collaborated on a circus. Go, you fools.

ATT Performing Arts Center presents Hedwig and the Angry Inch, playing February 7th-12th, Winspear Opera House. 2403 Flora St, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-880-0202. attpac.org.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town premiered in 1938. Using minimal set pieces and somewhat sparse dialogue, he told the story of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire in three acts. It won the Pulitzer for Best Drama. Grover’s Corners is a fictional town, which almost certainly means it’s supposed be the quintessential American town. Every town. With its plainspoken Stage Manager, setting up planks to create a soda fountain and talking directly to the audience, it makes no pretensions of being anything but rural. Curiously, Wilder makes a point of letting us know there’s no culture to speak of, museums or concert halls, but even this humble hamlet has its town drunks and tawdry secrets. Somehow, though the people we see in Grover’s Corners, don’t seem to take pleasure in gossip or the transgressions of others.

Our Town seems to concern itself mostly with the lives of The Webbs and The Gibbs. George Gibbs and Emily Webb are the oldest children and pretty much grow up together. Their dads are the town doctor and editor of the newspaper. We learn things about other characters, but mostly it seems to revolve around their growing attachment and fondness for each other. Eventually the two will get married, and the show skips around the timeline, beginning Act Two with the wedding before we see the intriguing incident that galvanizes George’s resolve to propose. A proposal, incidentally, we never actually hear. In Act Three Emily dies in childbirth, and the Stage Manager explains how humans are gradually “weaned away from the earth.”

Our Town is an elusive, deceptively non-rhetorical play. Obtuse and off-the-cuff, it sneaks up on you. It would be remiss to discuss Our Town without recognizing Wilder’s breakthrough of technique and result. The tone is somber, but never cynical or grim. Characters discuss topics like suicide and a man nearly freezing to death in the same way you might explain a recipe. But not out of bitterness or insensitivity. When Frank Gibbs explains to George he’s been taking his mother for granted, we are surprised when he offers his son a handkerchief. George’s sudden regret almost goes unnoticed. It’s easy to mistake Our Town’s nonchalance for quaintness, until a moment like Myrtle Gibb’s troubling epiphany, that there’s something “so wrong with the world.” Like a fact we always knew, but never said aloud.

Wilder finds a way in Our Town to disclose very sobering truths about what it means to be human, while explaining through the Stage Manager, that he doesn’t want to be hurtful. This is fairly revolutionary stuff for 1938. Especially when you consider how powerful these ideas are, in comparison to other playwrights take more time to reach their own particular versions of the truth. (With all due respect to Williams, O’Neill and Inge) He balances the disaffection of the dead with what must be one of the most famous scenes in the American Theatre. Emily relives a birthday from her adolescence and realizes (to her chagrin) that we’re too busy filling time to grasp how truly miraculous the world is. “Oh, Mama,” she says, “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me”. I cannot speak for others, but when Emily (Madyson Greewood) spokes these words, I got chills before my eyes filled with tears.

The Core Theatre has done an impeccable, pitch-perfect job with Our Town. The entire ensemble (eighteen actors!) is dedicated, authentic, canny and personable. At first I was leery of using contemporary costume for a play set in the early 20^th Century, but it really seemed to work well. Director James Prince has brought out the nuances and profound poignancy of this quietly overwhelming script. If you love theatre, make time to see this.

Written by Lauren Gunderson, Silent Sky was inspired by the life of American astronomer, Henrietta Leavitt. Born in the late 19^th century, Henrietta Swan Leavitt graduated from Radcliffe, going on to take a position at The Harvard College Observatory. She joined “Pickering’s Harem” mischievously (if insensitively) named because it was all women. Considering the meticulous and precise nature of their work, their wages bordered on the criminal, even for the early 1900’s. Struggles with illness left Leavitt partially deaf, yet dedication and vision facilitated her genius, and discoveries that would forever change the science of ascertaining earth’s place in the heavens.

Gunderson opens Silent Sky contrasting Henrietta with her sister Mira, who finds more fulfillment in music and nurturing a family than pursuing astronomy and mathematics. This dialectic between the religious and secular, the spiritual and cerebral, continues throughout the narrative. The sisters sustain their strong attachment long after Henrietta has started her work at Harvard (menial at first). But the submersion necessary for intense research makes it difficult to maintain correspondence with Mira, or a blossoming romance with colleague Peter Shaw. Much of Silent Sky considers what Leavitt must have sacrificed to pursue and realize the implications and moment of what began as an inkling. An intuitive spark of insight.

I’ve never cared for words like “feminist,” because they seem reductive. The unjust attribution of Leavitt’s legacy (only alleviated posthumously) is without question. And her achievements were diminished because she happened to be female. This is a flaw in the transactions of humanity, the insecurity of a patriarchy already tilted to male advantage. “Henrietta Leavitt discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars.” Put another way, she realized we could gauge the distance between the earth and a particular star, by measuring its brightness. This turned astronomy on its head, but it would be a long time before she would receive the credit due her. This is not a question of politics but ethics.

What makes Silent Sky so effulgent, so delightful is Gunderson’s masterful blend of the scientific with a dazzling grasp of the cosmos. We are immersed in Henrietta’s exquisite sense of wonder as she loses herself in the brilliance of endless galaxies. When she explains to Mira that the beauty of elegant theory and pattern of spheres and suns in motion amounts to her religion, we do believe her, but we also share in her ecstatic reverie.

WaterTower Theatre presents Silent Sky playing January 20th-February 12^th, 2017. 15650 Addison Road, Addison, Texas 75001. 972-450-6232. www.watertowertheatre.org

Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune has (the more you think about it) a bizarre premise. Johnny and Frankie work in the same diner. Frankie is a waitress and Johnny is a cook. When Act One opens the two are “consummating” at the end of a date. Frankie sees this as casual (but not indiscriminate) sex. Johnny has decided that Frankie’s the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Johnny believes in love at first sight. This, by itself, is not so awful, but Johnny comes on like a hurricane at a funeral. Like the old joke about the amorous Lesbian couple, Johnny doesn’t believe in second dates. He seems ready to move in. He’s charming and absolutely genuine, but his better qualities are soon engulfed by his utter lack of finesse. He does nothing by halves, but seems determined to tell Frankie how to behave as well. As any of us might imagine, this is a dubious approach to a new relationship.

McNally seems to be exploring role-reversal, too. Johnny is the romantic, emotion one, crazy to commit. Frankie is happy to take it slow, and see how things go, before jumping into an intense, lifelong attachment. It’s curious how Johnny seems to embody the downside of heartfelt passion. He seems to forget that Romeo and Juliet shared a mutual intensity. Johnny is so cocky and bossy (in addition to being tender and moonstruck) Frankie doesn’t know whether to appreciate his warmth or kick him out. He’s not just loopy, he seems to verge on being certifiable. As for Frankie, her sensible attitude is undercut by a pervasive sense of melancholy and spiritual damage. When she confides she sometimes pulls up a chair to watch an abusive couple across the courtyard, we wonder if she figures toxic attention is better than none at all.

Under the meticulous direction of Stefany Cambra, Jason Leyva and Jenny Tucker manage these ragged, demanding roles. McNally drags these characters through all sorts of trials, travails and wrenching personal moments. Leyva and Tucker are up on that stage for a very long stretch, in a drama that takes place in real time. The characters involve us in their prolonged, tumultuous connection, but we never sense the actors themselves are running out of steam. We are under their spell.

So, then, this is where Terrence McNally takes us. Frankie isn’t just cautious, she’s swimming dark waters. Johnny believes in living for the moment, and that Frankie and he share a destiny. The plot does much to encourage this. Like most excellent playwrights McNally leaves us at the watering trough and lets us reach our own conclusions There’s something vaguely twisted (and strangely satisfying) about the painful, somber thread that winds through this entire piece. We all know that successful relationships are not about finding the perfect mate, but the perfect match. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune teases us by sparking our longing for this pair of slapdash, tattered souls. We wind up feeling some odd mix of the frightening and sublime. We’re afraid they’ll stay together and afraid they won’t.

L.I. P. Service Productions presents Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, playing January 27th-February 12, 2017. Amy’s Studio of Performing Arts, 11888 Marsh Lane, Suite 600, Dallas, Texas 75234. 817-689-6461

Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress (playing at The Dupree Theatre in The Irving Arts Center) is a splendid, engaging, intriguing comedy. Like the best comedies, it emerges from an actual narrative, as opposed to hanging gags on a tenuous skeleton.  You might recognize the writer’s name from his association with American Beauty and Six Feet Under. Mr. Ball is an iconoclast, cheerfully mixing cynicism with soft spot for frailty, and a lack of tolerance for pretentiousness. Five Women is set in the Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 1990’s.  The occasion is a wedding. The poster of Malcolm X hanging over Meredith’s bed (sister of the bride) sets the tone. The conversation takes place between five bridesmaids (Frances, Meredith, Tricia, Georgeann, and Mindy) none of whom, it seems, are especially close to the bride. Frances: frail, mousy, sweet, functions as defender of traditional morals (“I don’t drink, I’m a Christian.”) while Meredith leads the charge of transgression.

You wonder if Five Women was chosen for its timely consideration of paradigm shifts in America’s salient values. The women smoke pot, imbibe, discuss their sexual escapades, while Frances is definitely a buzzkill. Mindy is a lesbian. Meredith disparages the phoniness of the posh wedding, her sister, the ceremony, while Tricia questions the validity of marriage as an institution, and long term romantic relationships of any kind. The name of Johnny Valentine is brought up repeatedly, as the Pan-like dreamboat who’s bedded three of the women and flirted with all of them. What makes Five Women so enjoyable and effective is Alan Ball’s refusal to stoop to didacticism or pontificating. He avoids stereotypes and clichés. For all the “sinful”, indulgent behavior, none of the women seems particularly evil or noble, just normal and free to find their own path. Ball confides the underpinnings of their attitudes, and laces the story with enough pathos to make it genuine and resonant. His dialogue is so crisp and skillful that laughter is nearly a reflex.

The one male character, Tripp, is (more or less) brought in at the 11^th Hour. He and Tricia debate the merits of strictly recreational sex. He explains his feelings run deeper than that, while she studiously avoids the hazard of playing along with what he needs her to be.  The banter is bright, and impressively unexpected, though it feels like Tripp has been sent in to rescue Tricia from her (admittedly reasonable) skepticism with men.  It feels a bit extraneous. That being said, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress is a refreshing, engaging show. Under the direction of Dennis Canright, the ensemble (Tammy Partanen, Nicole Neely, Liz J. Millea, Mandy Rausch, Laura Saladino and Hayden Evans) is nimble, sharp-witted and energetic. It closes this weekend, so don’t miss your opportunity to catch this great production.

MainStage Irving-Las Colinas :presents: Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, playing January 20^th-February 4^th, 2017. Irving Arts Center, 3333 North MacArthur Blvd, Irving, Texas 75062. 972-252-2787. www.irvingtheatreorg.

Written by George Brandt, Grounded, is a drama with one character, a female fighter pilot who is never named. She speaks to us directly, chipper and affable, combining the traits of warrior moxie and the simple determination of someone with a job to do. She has earned her place among other cracker- jack fliers, bonding at the local watering hole and enjoying the camaraderie. When a guy approaches who is neither intimidated nor alienated by her prowess, they connect and have sex that very night. Apart from being kindred spirits, they clearly have no use for traditional paradigms. After they marry, he’s happy to stay home and take care of their daughter, cook for her, and stoke the hearth fire for the long stretches when she must be away. Their sex life is spirited and nurturing.

When she is offered the opportunity to pilot a drone, our hero is not overcome with enthusiasm. The vast blue infinity she navigates with the exhilaration of a Valkyrie will no longer be available, only the second-hand experience of remote control. On the upside, she will be able to spend time every day with her husband and daughter, eat dinner at home, enjoy family life more fully. She sits beside other pilots in a trailer, where she looks at colorless landscape on a screen. The level of detachment almost makes it too easy to assault targets, as if swimming a dream. The hours are long and she drives across long, lonely, empty stretches after leaving home and when returning.

By taking us along on her enigmatic odyssey, we begin to identify with the pilot. There is a categorical difference between wielding her gleaming, silver vessel and the enormous robot bird of prey. She begins to undergo a shift in attitude. A sea change. Her job and the psychology that make it possible begins to spill into her civilian time. She forgets to remove her uniform, the richness of familial love begins to dissipate. Her professional focus and unconditional purpose begin to waver.

Despite the possibility that Grounded is based on a true story, the significance of a woman pilot seems undeniable. The warm, lovely photograph of her (belly exposed) during pregnancy, her fear that her daughter’s obsession with “Pretty Pony” means that she’s a “hair-tosser,” the wife she sees running to the car of a target. As she gradually acquires destructive power, we cannot ignore the irony that she also brings life into the world. When this ordeal finally overtakes her, it’s difficult to know how it will resolve itself.

As “The Pilot”, Jenny Ledel handles the task of occupying the stage for 90 minutes with authority and finesse. Ledel is beguiling, convivial, subtle. Fierce and stoic when she needs to be. She accommodates this challenging, enervating role with such skill and implacable dedication. She will get under your skin and sneak into your dreams.

Second Thought Theatre presents Grounded playing January 11^th– February 4^th, 2017. Bryant Hall (Kalita Humphreys Campus) 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd, Dallas, Texas 75219. www2tt.co. 866-811-4111.

Olivia and Gabe are moving into their first apartment together, after what has been a long engagement. They have yet to take the plunge. As we all know, moving is a nightmare, and act one finds poor Olivia, trying get an easy chair through a doorframe that is far too small. Clearly a metaphor for struggles to come, this particular piece is the first they chose together. Their apartment is pleasant, though in a dodgy neighborhood in Chicago, and simply getting the boxes from the moving van is very slow going. Despite vigilant attempts to divert well-meaning (if meddlesome) parents, they show up anyway. When Wyatt and Lydia must climb over the problematic chair to enter the apartment, they hear groaning from the window, mistaking the sound of heavy lifting for lovemaking. Yes, it’s that kind of comedy. Later Lydia keeps tabs while Olivia squats, making sure she doesn’t make contact with a suspicious toilet seat. Hence the title (Things My Mother Taught me) and our reassurance that these good folks are nothing, if not down-to-earth.

The trials that follow are numerous. Somewhere along the way Gabe’s plans to propose are revealed. The van and its contents are stolen. Olivia’s mother Karen is terrified she will rush into marriage, and repeat her same mistakes. The appearance of all four parents makes for some really awkward moments. The men rush out to salvage the truck, the super brings vodka so the three women can sink some healthy shots and hash out some problems. The guys are also allowed some alone time, to comiserate and share. Karen realizes she raised Olivia so well, that all her worrying was for nothing. Gabe learns from Carter and Wyatt that sometimes practicality must take a backseat to romance.

Most of the surprises in Things My Mother Taught Me come from the revelation that Gabe and Olivia have swapped roles with their parents. Karen encourages Olivia to experiment before she settles down, and the dads must tell Gabe there’s more to connubial bliss than acting responsibly. It goes on and on. The women drink like pros, the fathers return from the bar singing Katy Perry’s “I kissed a girl, and I liked it.” All of this to convince the elders possess 21^st Century streetcred. Evolved and still vibrant enough to add something to the conversation. It’s warm, appealing and sweet. Maybe with just a push, playwright Katherine di Savino could have come up with something more like Butterflies Are Free or Barefoot in the Park, which has the loopiness, but more beneath the surface. Things My Mother Taught Me is engaging and amusing entertainment.

Rover Dramawerks presents Things My Mother Taught Me playing January 12th-February 4^th, 2017.

Tickets are $22.00 Friday and Saturday nights, $16.00 Thursdays and Matinees. 221West Parker Road, Suite 580, Plano, Texas 75023. 972-849-0358. www.roverdramawerks.com

Olivia : Shauna Holloway

Karen : Nancy James Lamb

Carter: David Noel,

Ivy Opdyke : Lydia

Joe Porter : Wyatt

Ben Scheer : Gabe

Martin Sinise : Max

Director: Carol M. Rice

Stage Manager: Darcy Koss

Set Designer: Abby Kipp-Roberts

Costume Designer: Erica Remi Lorca

Sound Designer: Jason Rice

Lighting Designer: Maxim Overton

Properties Designer: Christian M. Burgess

Light and Sound Board Operator: Darcy Koss

Program: Carol Rice

Box Office: Kim Wickware

In December I was privileged to attend John-Michael Colgin’s Meatball Seance, a performance piece in which he connects with his deceased mother by cooking her special meatballs while courting a succession of boyfriends. It was a workshop performance, which means he was still in the process of shaping the new show. This was made clear to the audience at the onset. As you entered the theater, two large, butcher paper posters listed ingredients and cooking instructions. There were tables laid out with breadcrumbs, eggs, olive oil, basil, wine, etc…and an electric skillet.

Colgin did a lot of his preliminary stage exploration here in Dallas a few years ago, under the tutelage and guidance of the late, visionary Matt Tomlanovich, and Nouveau 47, which sponsors much burgeoning and unorthodox talent, as part of their mission and ideology. Colgin’s groundbreaking work work as a monologist and performance artist has been extraordinary, seamlessly blending anecdotal experience with metaphysical and emotional epiphany. His shows always feel spontaneous, and his warm, exuberant energy is almost impossible to resist. He climbs over furniture, talks directly to audience members; his unabashed and genuine lack of shame when discussing his queer sexual exploits is so charismatic, it absolves gay identity of the perverse stigma so many bring to it.

Meatball Seance certainly doesn’t lack for Colgin’s own peculiar brand of charm. Like so many of us do, he still talks to his mother, and acknowledges her presence in his daily life. The three guys he pulled from the audience to play his boyfriends were quite cooperative, considering he had them helping with all kinds of things, in the production of his mother’s recipe. He even got the rest of us to join hands in an attempt to summon his mother’s spirit. During the course of the show, he explained the magical aspects of mom making food for him as a boy (the kind of enchantment we can all relate to) and subsequently bringing each boyfriend home to get acquainted with mother’s spirit. He is quite skilled and intuitive here, he includes us in the nonchalant, yet sincere ritual of invocation.

As he’s demonstrated in previous shows, Coligin isn’t shy with his hands-on, enthusiastic (if sloppy) approach to food and other ways of getting cozy and crazy on the stage. We gather, at the heart of his loopy shenanigans, some ideas about what it means to date and find one’s husband in the world, and boundaries and sacred and beautiful energy our parents can bring to our lives. One of Colgin’s great strengths is his ability to elucidate and make a point without belaboring. That being said, I wish Meatball Seance hadn’t felt quite so amorphous, so off the cuff. It seemed to lack a kind of clarity and purpose, that made the motivating ideas inevitable or unavoidable. It was very pleasurable, but perhaps not quite there yet.

Meatball Seance played at Nouveau 47, The Magolia Lounge, Fair Park, 1121 First Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75210.

Billed as a new play by Beth Henley, Laugh, currently playing at Theatre 3, is a comedy that begins by spoofing Tennessee Williams and then proceeds to undercut the grand mythology of American pop film. Henley always knew how to score humor from the follies of eccentric loners and unrequited love (Crimes of the Heart, The Miss Firecracker Contest) but perhaps it works better when she takes the scenic route. When Mabel’s Uncle Curly is blown up by a premature mining blast, she is left wealthy but without family. She goes to visit her Aunt October Defoliant and Uncle Oscar Defoliant, and Cousin Roscoe, without realizing they want Roscoe to marry her and land her fortune. Uncle Oscar is a drunkard and Aunt October a schemer. Roscoe loves to catch butterflies. They all talk in Williams’ special Southern blend of loftiness, disappointment and tawdriness. Mabel is beautiful, but she could make Ma Kettle look like Coco Chanel. Roscoe finds Mabel’s lack of breeding repugnant, but confesses the plot to grab her fortune. In the meantime, they take refuge in a movie theater, where they absorb the salient delight of cinema stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Theda Bara.

To escape Aunt October’s desire to poison Mabel (now that marriage is off the table) they flee to the wasteland of the American Western Desert. There they fall into the clutches of a fiendish, salacious photographer, who wishes to use Mabel in pornographic Valentines. His crony escorts Roscoe from the premises at gunpoint (“Cowardice,” Roscoe exclaims, “My capacious failing.”) leaving Mabel with the impression he has abandoned her. By now Roscoe has grown quite attached to Mabel, but it’s a few years before he catches up with her in Hollywood. She has become a glamorous screen idol (ala Marlene Dietrich?) with a platinum blonde wig. Even when she recognizes him, it’s awhile before their wayward, tempestuous love is consummated. If ever.

Henley’s point, it seems, is the sham of believing what entertainment culture tells us to do. Instead of experiencing and understanding love, we fall prey to the indoctrination of movies and conventional wisdom. This is certainly a valid point, and well worth considering. That being said, while Laugh is fairly clever, it never feels funny. The pervasive flatulence, the shtick, the goofy send ups of Hollywood depravity, the withering response to Gothic decadence and film’s lame attempt to depict untainted love. You can build a compelling play from mockery, but the tone here is misleading. The narrative’s driven by contempt but we’re given the impression it’s all about amusement. It’s drama in comedy’s clothes.

The cast of Laugh is undoubtedly keen, versatile, poised and very, very smart. They have lots to do, and they bring it off with aplomb. Props to Ashley Elizabeth Bashore, Bradley Campbell, Magdiel Carmona, Debbie Crawford, Steph Garrett, Ashley Wood, and Isaac Leaverton (The Piano Player) for their diligence and forbearance.

Theatre 3 presents Laugh, playing January 5^th – 29th, 2017. 2800 Routh Street, Suite 168, Dallas, Texas 75201-1417. theatre3dallas.com. 214-871-3300.