Denying Mirth, Not Defying Death

ETC's 'Acts' not as funny as playwrights intended

REVIEW BY TOM MCELFRESH

When a playwright writes a line about "a lifetime membership in The Hemlock Society," a suicide advocacy group, it's reasonable to expect the director or the actor, preferably both, to recognize it as a joke. If the actor or the director, preferably both, are sufficiently accomplished, they'll tell the joke in a way that induces hearty giggles from a happy audience.

That didn't happen at Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati (ETC), where misperceived performances and blundering direction conspired to make a trio of Death Defying Acts by famous playwrights deny mirth instead of defy death.

Let's emphasize that these are not the finest or funniest examples of David Mamet's, Elaine May's and Woody Allen's work. (The Allen piece is decidedly inferior.) But they're finer and funnier than ETC's loud, lumpish presentation. The suicide society membership and dozens of other fine, if mordant, punch lines misfired into silence. Not until late in the third and longest Act, when Allen's sex-obsessed "Central Park West" widened into galloping slapstick, was there solid and frequent laughter from the house.

A long-running success in New York, Death Defying Acts assembles three scripts that make some side of demise risible. In Mamet's pungent fragment, "An Interview," a lawyer is welcomed into an ominous hereafter. If one could imagine a televised New Yorker, this is the sort of intense, intelligent froth it might feature. May's "Hotline" rams the hysterics of a suicidal prostitute into the iceberg hulk of impersonal urban institutions and the bumbling aid of an amateur suicide counselor. Allen's "Central Park West" tosses its jokes from a carousel of infidelity whereon post-Freudian, almost post-sensate sophisticates seduce each other while attempting suicide and manslaughter.

Though brisk, the show's pace remains under control through the tiny, shiny Mamet sketch. Robert B. Rais has graced the ETC stage with much excellent work this season. Herein, as Hell's gatekeeper, he punches holes in the air with Mamet's staccato bursts of surreal dialogue. He is so deadly serious when he inquires, "Did you bury the lawn mower?" that the loopy question seems cogent. With racing words and flailing gestures, Greg Procaccino defines a fully faceted, fully repugnant lawyer. However, in his urgency, his diction turned mushy and a number of potential laughs got lost.

Once May's "Hotline" started ringing, director Mark Mochabee and the cast treated the evening's remaining words more as avalanche than script, an onslaught of words that buried character, nuance and most of the jokes.

Kelly Germain made the suicidal hooker loud, mawkish and as repellent as her Spandex costume. For May's bleak comedy to work, the audience needs to care about a wounded woman inside the anger. She wasn't there, so nobody laughed much. As an apprentice suicide counselor, Buz Davis had one winning moment. The intuitive, empathetic character saves a life, only to be accused of arrogance for doing so. He soon discovers that when helping people, "You never know whether you're being a Good Samaritan or falling into the sin of pride."

Despite playcraft lapses that director Mochabee didn't smooth over and an indeterminate, fade-out ending which oddly and irrelevantly recalled a Wyeth painting, "Hotline" is near vintage Elaine May satire. Performing it successfully demands the whining attack and verbal precision of a classic Nichols and May comedy routine. ETC gave it neither.

During the onrush of "Central Park West," one of Allen's lust-propelled characters says to another, "This is truly comical." Only it isn't. Not very. As played at ETC, not at all. What might have been comic was slam-dunked in the slugfest direction and graceless performances.

There was a time when Allen's skewering wit roamed the globe, tweaking noses and poking fun at anything. No pretense was safe. The jokes were fresh and memorable -- whether with the burlesque breadth of Bananas or with the salience and sensitivity of Annie Hall. Now, Allen's view and humor have narrowed and soured.

There are no people in "Central Park West," only five rampant libidos. They seem ever so sleek and smart, but they're really just tiresome case histories blunted by their own stale sophistication. And the jokes they tell are just as stale.

ENSEMBLE THEATRE OF CINCINNATI presents Death Defying Acts through May 17.

CityBeat, Vol. 4, Issue 24; May 7-13, 1998