TRIPLE PLAY
posted by James Reel
Three theatrical items from me in the latest Tucson Weekly. First, there’s an introduction to a group that’s trying to move itself out of Phoenix and into Tucson:
Joe Marshall's back in town, and he's looking for company. Specifically, he's looking for an audience for The Alternative Theatre Company, which he's transplanting from Phoenix. He's also looking for enough appropriate actors to support a full season of gay and lesbian theater.Next comes a review of a farce at Live Theatre Workshop:
Caught in the Net is officially a sequel to Run for Your Wife, but sometimes, it seems more like a remake. Once again, John scurries from one apartment to the other, trying to keep his households apart. Once again, it's the reluctant Stanley who must come up with one brilliant lie after another to protect John. Once again, there's some confusion about sexual identity. (This time, nobody in the play is actually gay, but Cooney does manage to get laughs out of suspicions of ephebophilia; no, this production was not underwritten by Mark Foley.)And finally, an evaluation of a fine effort by Sacred Chicken Productions, in which I begin to change my mind about the script:
When I first saw Eric Overmyer's On the Verge two decades ago at Arizona Theatre Company, I hated it. The allegory about the evolution of women's roles from the 19th century to the 20th seemed pretentious in its language, arbitrary in its use of absurdity, and clumsy in its exposition and development of the three main characters.
After a while, the only images that remained clear in my mind were poor Wendy Lehr whirring an eggbeater and indulging in vacant-eyed, Tourette-like blurtings of the word "manioc." I sincerely hoped that Overmyer wasn't planning to give up his day job writing for St. Elsewhere.
On the Verge seemed like a substantially better play last weekend in the version by Sacred Chicken Productions, a company that shows itself only at widely spaced intervals, when actress Carrie Hill and her friends find a script they adore that nobody else is doing locally. I still can't quite understand why the Sacred Chicken folks, the always smart director Sabian Trout and theater companies across the country love this play so extravagantly, but thanks to this new production, I'm beginning to figure it out.
