THE POWER AND THE PENIS
posted by James Reel
In the latest Tucson Weekly, you can witness my effort to cover four plays in the space of two reviews (damned economy). First, the anatomy lesson:
Everyone knows there are a lot of pricks in the theater world, and they're something of an obsession in two shows that opened locally last week. Live Theatre Workshop's late-night Etcetera series is presenting _The Penis Monologues_, which is exactly what it claims to be, except that the monologues are _about_ penises, not _by_ them. In contrast, coyness rules at Beowulf Alley's _3 Guys in Drag Selling Their Stuff_; the male members are unremarked upon and hidden beneath skirts, tee-hee. In this case, too, the title says it all; indeed, there's nothing more to this play than what the marquee announces.
You can find the full review, including a Latin anatomical pun I’ve been waiting 35 years to use, here. Then, on to something more serious:
Power—how to wield it, how to abuse it. That's the subject of two plays, written nearly 2 1/2 millennia apart, that opened in Tucson last week. A witch-princess exacts revenge in _Medea_ at the UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre, while an American president squares off against an ambitious industrialist in _Camping With Henry and Tom_ at Invisible Theatre. Warren G. Harding is the president in question in Mark St. Germain's _Camping With Henry and Tom_. Remember Harding? Probably not, unless you're an American-history enthusiast, and the Teapot Dome scandal rings a bell. Harding was initially, in the early 1920s, a popular president, but his administration was probably the most corrupt in American history, at least until George Dubya Bush came along. To his credit, Harding was never directly implicated in the scandals, and St. Germain depicts him as merely an amiable front man for a political machine; as Roger Owen plays him at IT, he's tender-hearted and intellectually bland. Not the sort of personality you'd expect to be able to stand up to a combative Henry Ford and cynical Thomas Edison out in the Maryland woods. … Euripides' _Medea_, in a fluid, colloquial translation by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, is onstage via Arizona Repertory Theatre. It's a student production directed with steadiness and grace by faculty member Brent Gibbs, but overall, it's an uneven effort redeemed by four strong young actors.
Get the details here.
