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STAGE REVIEW Comparisons are Odious Black marks for a play on blacklists and black outs STEFFEN SILVIS |
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What to Do About Nothing Stark Raving Theater at Theater! Theatre! 3430 SE Belmont St., 231-4872 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 pm Sundays Closes Jan. 2 $8.50-$15 On an episode of You Bet Your Life, host Groucho Marx asked a bland hausfrau to tell the audience something about herself. "Groucho," she said, "I have 13 children, and I love my husband," to which Groucho replied, "Well, I love my cigar, but I take it out once in a while." The blackout that followed was instantaneous--as if a finger had been hovering over the juice-switch in the control booth, waiting for one rogue word from Marx. The incident is instructive when looking at Judy Sheehan's latest play, What to Do About Nothing, which uses the "golden age" of live television as its setting. Unfortunately, Sheehan distorts the '50s through a '90s lens, larding the play with anachronisms. Sheehan crowbars the action into the fag-end days of McCarthyism, when especially risqué asides were censored. Yet she lacks a true understanding of the people and codes of the period, which makes her piece seem hastily concocted. As the title suggests, Sheehan has also used Much Ado About Nothing as inspiration. In fact, she has appropriated the play for modernizing, with a clever idea that certainly looks promising on paper. The action takes place on the set of Nothing Sacred, a variety show starring a famed vaudevillian, Max Prince--an amalgam of Leonato and Don Pedro (Scott Coopwood). As with Leonato's estate, the set is seat for romance. There are the young lovers Charlie and Fran (Devan McCoy and Allison Batty), the Claudio and Hero of the piece. Fran's a dancer on the show, and Charlie is one of the co-writers. His partner, Ben Peters (Paul Palazzolo), is the head writer of the team. Sarcastic and cynical, he's more of a world-weary Benedick. His Beatrice is the show's leading lady, Beth Gold (Torrey Cornwell). Ben and Beth have had numerous dealings with each other and never pass up an opportunity to trade barbs. Trying to keep everyone on the show happy is Prince's assistant, Maggie Sinclair (Nancy Wilson), who bears Margaret's voluptuousness and Ursula's love for schemes. Onto this stage soon steps a nefarious Don John in the shape of red-baiter Dick Johnson (Greg James). It's Johnson's task to weed out Communists for the show's sponsor, a pork concern. Scene for scene, Sheehan reconstructs the plot like bones, but the bones have been picked clean of wit and meaning. If you take a brilliant comedy as your foundation, you must live with the consequences of comparison. What to Do About Nothing is almost void of humor. This is surprising, as Sheehan's last play, Alice in Ireland, was delightful. But here she manages to mangle the sheer joyousness of Much Ado. The primary failure is with Sheehan's Benedick and Beatrice. What passes as repartee is nothing but strained playroom snipings. The language of Ben and Beth is so uninteresting to us that we immediately throw our attention onto the lovers. The secondary tragicomedy of Claudio and Hero is here made the main focus by default, thus deflating what little comedy there is. The skits on Nothing Sacred are not the brilliant sketches of Your Show of Shows or The Ernie Kovacs Show. One magician's skit is lambasted by cast and crew as awful, yet the audience could be forgiven for not being able to distinguish between that skit and the others Sheehan has conjured. If Marxian innuendo (whether from Groucho or Karl) was cause for broadcasters' concern, it would pale into insignificance beside what Sheehan would've broadcast in the '50s. After Johnson tells Charlie that Fran is a Communist sympathizer, Charlie denounces Fran at their wedding, which is being televised on the show. Putting aside the lame, cobbled-together motives given to Johnson and Charlie for this action, the very televising of a wedding (especially on a show entitled Nothing Sacred) could never have happened in America in the '50s. It's not that audiences were smarter or more sophisticated, but they did have a smug sense of propriety. The marriage of anarcho-ukeleleist Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky in 1969 on The Tonight Show was a cultural earthquake that caused discussion even in my first-grade class. Sheehan's piece is choked with such incidents that drive a critic to captiousness. With a play that, although promising, is woefully underdeveloped, it falls to the director and actors to make a go of it. Myra Donnelley certainly keeps the action flowing, perhaps, at times, overflowing. An old trick with inadequate material is to race through it as quickly as you can and hope the audience doesn't hear it. Donnelley resorts to this too frequently. The acting, too, tends to overwhelm, especially Scott Coopwood's Max Prince, which reminds one of electrified ham. The odd laugh is usually supplied by Nancy Wilson, almost solely by the force of her personality. What to Do About Nothing? Well, that is the question.
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