Playwright Lisa D'Amour has slowly gained a national reputation, which is fairly
well deserved, as she is a writer who possesses a fertile imagination and a
singular voice untainted by television's simplicities. But, sadly, she's also
prolific to the extent that her talents often become diffuse, sloppiness sets
in, and one walks away from most of her plays wondering if she's ever been introduced
to an editor.
The world premiere of her triptych Three Mutants evinces these tendencies.
Here are three one-acts loosely tied together as surrealistic examinations of
how women are socialized in this culture. But there's a marked difference in
quality from one play to the next, to the point where one starts the evening
very excited by the material only to end feeling deeply disappointed and impatient.
Perhaps in the hands of a matured director this heap of ideas and images could've
been better sorted through. As it is, D'Amour has been paired with her directorial
equal, Charmian Creagle, a young and very talented artist whose work continues
to be frustratingly uneven.
The first piece, Dream of a West Texas Marsupial Girl, rates as one
of the finest pieces of theater I've seen this season. In exploring the terrible
limits placed on women whose bodies do not conform to an arbitrary norm, D'Amour
has created a strange and lyrical tale of a young woman who was born with a
pouch and who is hounded from town to town for her "freakishness." But the Marsupial
Girl is far from a victim. She finds solace in an interior world of her own
devising, complete with her own language, and ends as a storyteller, having
gently mutated into old age where everyone is cast off as physical freaks of
youth.
The great success of D'Amour's Marsupial Girl is that she has deftly and sympathetically
given us a portrait of one of those lonely schoolyard girls who skip and sing
alone, having swallowed their fill of peers' taunts for the way they dress,
look, act, speak. Creagle's staging is fluid and, again, proves that she possesses
interpretive intelligence. Creagle pulls an excellent performance from Ingrid
Carlson (who was very good in last season's Eye of God), but then, the
entire ensemble--including Liminal's Amanda Boekelheide, Georgia Luce and Jen
Olson, as well as Sean Doran, Luis Moreno and Madeleine Sanford--is good.
Then, however, we go from the fully winged to the larval: Monique the Mosquito
Takes First Runner Up can only be described as a bloated sketch. D'Amour's
targets are beauty pageants (a rather tired topic) and the bizarre rituals that
prospective hopefuls perform, including the sanctification of eating disorders.
Turning the contestants into mosquitoes that must starve themselves of blood
is clever, but not for a half-hour.
D'Amour is generous to her directors, leaving stage business and blocking to
their own imaginations, or offering unstageable directions such as, "Monique,
out for exercise, sees several mosquitoes drunk on Yellow Fever. She watches
them infect half an orphanage." But such vagueness leaves pieces like this open
to excess. After the perfectly modulated Marsupial Girl, Creagle's cast
hits the stage speed-addled, quivering and screeching without breath. Enunciation
becomes a thing of dim memory, while Creagle forsakes any attempt at a physical
score, leaving the stage to group-improv chaos.
Though it is axiomatic elsewhere in the world that "comedy is in the timing,"
too often in Portland we suffer through disasters of frantic and unfocused slapstick
and amateur mugging that hopes to pass as comedy. So it is in this case. Moreno's
"Look, Ma, no technique" take on drunkenness is strictly middle school, as is
much else. But Creagle is to blame for swamping the piece through inattention.
Played straight, it could have had more bite.
However, earnestness does slump onto the stage in the finale, Autopsy.
D'Amour's coda is a lazy cliché, possessing all the profundity of a coupon
mailer. In this self-righteous bit of obviousness, an intoning male coroner
dissects a stillborn girl's body, itemizing it like a butcher's chart plots
cuts. Meanwhile, the cast swap images of noirish femmes fatales and glasses
of milk (women being the unholy mixture of milk and meat). In case we haven't
been sufficiently bludgeoned by these subtleties, a helpful filmstrip kicks
in to show us a butcher at work. D'Amour's coroner informs us that the birthed-up
scrap in question died of anencephaly: a congenital absence of part of the brain
and spinal cord. Fittingly, the piece also lacks thought and backbone. Creagle
and crew try to give this lump life, which is more than it deserves. The one
constant throughout is the fine score created by Katie Griesar and Sean Doran,
which promises more than the piece delivers.
Unfortunately, there is no intermission after Marsupial Girl, so many
will miss experiencing
an excellent and worthwhile production.
