A Roller Derby Play with More Laughs Than Drama at the Balagan

Christine Nelson and Nick Edwards in “The Jammer” at the Balagan. Photo by Adrea Huysing.

“Frankly, I could just sit around watching Ray Tagavila playing different characters all night,” my guest said as we left the theatre, and that pretty much sums up the Balagan’s side-splittingly funny production of Rolin Jones‘ The Jammer (through April 3, tickets $12-$15).

The Balagan has had a extremely odd but undeniably successful season so far, with The Jammer following in the tradition of the inexplicable Zastrozzi: Master of Discipline. On its own, there’s not a lot to be said for the script. Set in 1958, the story follows a wide-eyed naif from Brooklyn with a penchant for epistolary eloquence, who abandons his extremely ugly girlfriend to join the roller derby circuit. The humor is fairly toothless, the story cheesy, the drama cliche, and the ending saccharine. But somehow, the Balagan’s company of talented actors, under the direction of Terri Weagant, owns all those weaknesses in just the right way, and the result is a perplexingly entertaining 90-minute show.

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Jack Lovington (Nick Edwards) is an aw-shucks good Catholic boy from Brooklyn. Raised in an orphanage by Father Kosciusko (Michael D. Blum), he spends his days working at the same cardboard box factory that killed his parents (“brown lung”) and his nights driving cabs, trying to save up enough money to marry his hideously ugly girlfriend to whom he’s been engaged for two years. Lovington’s one outlet is roller derby, and when a sly promoter named Lenny Ringle (Ashley Bagwell) shows up offering him more money than Lovington could dream of to be the star of the New York derby team he’s setting up in a new league, Lovington jumps at the chance.

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The roller derby segments take a moment to get used to; the physically disastrous history of putting rollerskating onstage (from Starlight Express to Xanadu) no doubt in mind, the segments are performed on foot, with actors occasionally going into slow-motion to capture the effect of the viciousness of roller derby competition. That may sound cheesy, but trust me, it works. Ringle’s secret weapon is a mentally deranged, extremely violent young woman named Lindy Batello (Christine Nelson) that he springs from the mental institution whenever he needs a bad chick for his teams. Batello is eventually paid to take Lovington’s mind off his girlfriend, who’s taken up with another guy in his absence, which leads Lovington to fall in love with her, her getting pregnant, and finally his coming-of-age in the big bad world of outside of Brooklyn, touring around the eastern seaboard while Ringle tries to sell his fixed games as a real sport with more than the usual amount of entertainment.

The cast is what, in the end, makes the show. Edwards, who got plenty of favorable attention as one of the talented ensemble in last year’s audience favorite The History Boys at ArtsWest, is a charming lead man who emanates a goofy innocence and elicits guffaws from the audience as he plunges through his character’s occasional eloquence in thick Brooklynese. But the show really revolves around Ashley Bagwell, an actor I’ve yet to see demonstrate much versatility but who does what he does well. Ringle starts out a slick showman with a silver tongue and ends as a indefatigable but essentially defeated dreamer, whose worldly cynicism has been undercut by his unrealistic hopes in the eyes of his now wise-to-the-world protege.

But the end itself is downright too heavy, too slow, and too long. If the road to getting there wasn’t so damn funny, it wouldn’t be worth it, and that’s where the supporting cast comes in. Tagavila is the Balagan’s ace in the hole, and whether he’s playing a Irishman who refers to himself in the third-person (“Don’t worry, later Charlie’ll take you out for some beers and sluts”) or a patrician doctor, he seriously owns the scenes he’s in.

As I mentioned, Jones’ humor isn’t very ribald, and the director seems to have allowed her cast a great deal of freedom to reference to parody. The absolutely most hilarious scene–half of which felt ad libbed–featured Ringle taking Lovington to the doctor for a scorching case of genital warts, courtesy of his one-night tryst with Batello. I have no idea what was going on, exactly, but Bagwell and Tagavila had the audience crying with laughter at lines that feel like references (“You know, he first name’s actually ‘nurse,’” Tagavila says of the slow-but-sexy nurse), or self-referential additions (“You don’t look like a Dr. Friedman,” Bagwell says to the decidedly not Jewish Tagavila). And why a two-by-four was brought in as the prop for a medical lance, I will never know. All I can say is, it hurt to laugh that hard, and props to Bagwell and Tagavila for not cracking up.