Number Three

[January 10th, 2007] Making violence funny is one of the basic elements of comedy; from Charlie Chaplin to Jim Carrey, film's most popular comedians have grabbed laughs by hurting themselves and everyone else on set. But things get messy when children are involved.

"It's the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy that interests me," Ebbe Roe Smith—local actor, screenwriter and author of Number Three, which opens this week at Third Rail Repertory Theatre—told me at a recent rehearsal. "I tried to write something that's funny, but deals with alcoholism and abuse. I wanted to sneak up on the audience and stab them in the back."

And sneak he does. Number Three, which draws from Smith's own experiences as the son of a career naval officer, starts off with all the schmaltzy appeal of an adult version of Our Gang, but the spell is broken as soon as Dad shows up and starts smacking the kids around.

The script is at once hilarious and deeply disturbing, so it's no surprise that it caught the attention of Slayden Scott Yarbrough, artistic director of Third Rail. The wildly popular company has made its name with black comedies like Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, and Yarbrough decided to make Number Three the centerpiece of its first full season—making Number Three both the first world premiere and the first play by a local author to be performed by Third Rail.

"I saw it at JAW and just loved it," Yarbrough says. "I'm just trying to capture the spirit of the writing." He's worked with Smith in rehearsals, and even recruited four of the five actors who read the play at JAW/West for his production, including local favorites Maureen Porter and Tim True. Third Rail member Michael O'Connell rounds out the cast.

The latest in a rash of recent works featuring adults playing children, Number Three avoids the usual pitfalls of the genre by not attempting to imitate childlike dialogue. Instead, Smith has captured the confused and frightening nature of early childhood as he remembers it. "Doing family work, for a writer, is a no-brainer," he says. "I just wrote what I lived through."