Know Theatre has opened a smartly directed and enjoyable production of Joseph Zettelmaier’s Pulp on its Jackson Street mainstage in Over-the-Rhine. The production is part of the National New Play Network’s “Rolling World Premiere” program, which supports three or more theaters willing to produce a show during a 12-month period. The Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis presented Pulp last spring, and another production is onstage at the 88-seat Williamston Theatre in Michigan through Oct. 23.
Know Theatre audiences enjoyed another script by the Michigan-based playwright Zettelmaier, All Childish Things, last December. It was a wild heist caper by a trio of Star Wars junkies who decide to break into an old Kenner warehouse in Cincinnati and steal some priceless collectibles. For Pulp, Zettelmaier mines another pop culture medium: pulp fiction, a literary phenomenon that was all the rage in the 1930s.
Set in 1933 Los Angeles, the tale of a murder investigation oozes noir mystery, but pushes beyond the clichés with wry, self-aware moments. The production is angularly lit by Know’s artistic director Andrew Hungerford; the period-perfect scenic design is by Sarah Beth Hall. As scenes change, a stage drape is pulled to the right or the left like a cinematic wipe, adorned by projected sketches of pulp fiction magazine covers. Frank Ellery, the down-on-his-luck private investigator played by Paul Riopelle, is annoyed and distracted from his hard-boiled narration every time the curtain slides by. These “meta” moments become more amusing with each iteration.
The murder victim is a literary agent with just four clients, and those authors are, of course, the suspects of the gruesome crime. Each is a vivid character type. Maggie Lou Rader plays the femme-fatale romance writer Desirée St. Clair, a tough-talking, assertive sexpot who hires Ellery. Justin McCombs channels funny-man John Cleese with wacky physicality as effete Walter Kingston-Smith, whose specialty is adventure tales and who masquerades as an ineffectual righter-of-wrongs known as the “The Cloak.”
Dylan Shelton is the creepy R.A. Lyncroft, fascinated with the mystical and macabre and clearly inspired by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Darnell Pierre Benjamin (recently hilarious as a drag queen in Ensemble Theatre’s The Legend of Georgia McBride) plays Bradley Rayburn, a loony sci-fi writer and inventor.
It’s great fun to see Cincinnati Shakespeare Company regulars Rader, McCombs and Riopelle step outside classical performances and elevate these caricatures. Shelton, an able actor who’s also the artistic director of Madcap Puppets, gets to spread his wings with a deliciously dark role. And Benjamin steps out twice, playing his role as a twitchy young man and a cantankerous time-traveling senior citizen.
Since all four suspects are writers of overheated fiction, it’s a perfect opportunity to let the tropes of those genres play out as Frank tries to weave his way through circuitous stories and motives to identify the killer. Lyncroft is constantly critical in a step-outside-the-story way when twists and turns in the plot are too pedestrian and predictable to bear, and that’s part of the fun — like a good joke when you can anticipate the punch line.
Frank tells Desirée that artists (he was a pulp magazine illustrator before becoming a private investigator) and detectives have some common ground: “We’re good with details.” That could be said of Zettelmaier’s script, too. It is a wonderful playground for Hungerford and his talented cast. It’s full of clichéd lines that are pushed with humor. He knows the predictable moments that fuel these popular literary forms, and he exaggerates and satirizes them in ways that advance the story. It ultimately dawns on the cynical investigator that his suspects don’t just create the words they write: They actually live them.
I won’t give away Pulp’s ending, other than to say that if you know your fiction genres, you’ll see what’s coming. If anything, Zettelmaier revels in them a bit too much, as the play’s conclusion seems to arrive at least twice if not three times. But that’s OK, since the actors — and the audience — are having such a good time telling this tall tale.
Pulp seems to have a promising theatrical future beyond its “rolling world premiere,” which continues here through Oct. 29. I suspect it could become a favorite with community theaters. For more information, visit knowtheatre.com.
CONTACT RICK PENDER: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 5-12, 2016.
