IS THERE A SCRIPT DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE?

posted by James Reel

    Arizona Theatre Company is presenting Tuesdays with Morrie. It’s got a good director and two-man cast, but otherwise I’m not impressed:

    The house lights dim, and the curtain rises on Morrie Schwartz, a popular but aged sociology professor at Brandeis University. Morrie does a loose-limbed little dance for us, and we sense that we should enjoy it while we can, for this is a play, and we are aware that by the end of the play, Morrie will dance no more. In about 90 minutes, this vibrant character will succumb to Beautiful Death Syndrome.
    This is an extremely rare affliction limited almost exclusively to characters in plays and movies. Symptoms include suddenly heightened levels of forgiveness and sagacity, concurrent with a gradual physical decline that does not preclude projecting the voice to the balcony. Blessedly, cases of Beautiful Death Syndrome almost never involve disagreeable discharges from various orifices, soiled sheets, foul odors, sunken facial features, long bouts of unconsciousness, anger, bitterness, fear or crying, except among other characters and the audience. The victim of Beautiful Death Syndrome merely gets weaker and weaker, and expires with quiet dignity after uttering a few final profundities.
    Often, we last see the victim of Beautiful Death Syndrome posthumously, in an uplifting image that may involve dancing in a golden light far upstage. For now that he has passed away, he is going to a Better Place: the cast party.

    We know about Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers, and we know about the scandalous internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. But we rarely see those stories intertwine, as they surely did 60 years ago.
    Intertwine they do in an Oliver Mayer play aptly titled Conjunto. The word means "united" or "conjoined," and that's precisely what happens to his characters, though none too easily, in a fine new production at Borderlands Theater.
    "Conjunto" is also a style of music popular among the working class of Texas and Northern Mexico; in our area, the accordion-driven music is better known as "norteño." This particular music has no place in Mayer's play--instead, we hear 1940s pop hits, singing cowboy Gene Autry and charro cantor Jorge Negrete--but it's relevant in that it's music of and for people who toil, especially those bent close to the earth.
    Such are the characters in Mayer's play.