The Annex's Unwieldy Satire Takes on Glenn Beck, Mormon Elders, Tall Buildings

Annex fields a large, capable cast for "Her Mother Was Imagination." (Photo: Ian Johnston/Annex Theatre)

Her Mother Was Imagination (at Annex Theatre through August 28), the dystopian satire from local playwright Elizabeth Heffron and collaborators Ellie McKay (director), Max Reichlin, and Daniel Worthington, is at war with many things, one of them being my desire to laugh all the way through the play. It's a fitfully entertaining fever dream, never settling on being either satire that leaves a mark, a timely cautionary tale about the world to come, or an affecting allegory about women's restricted choices.

At $15, you're getting more than your money's worth, except in lumbar support. The play stretches to two and a half hours so that it can fit all its targets in--Beck, LDS, eugenics, climate-change deniers, elderly patriarchs, young men who are dicks, whacked-out revolutionary feminists, subservient artists--but as the play progresses, the satirical impulse that fueled its opening number is sapped by earnestness.

From sketchy scene to scene, the energy level varies, and an unwonted sense of profanely dramatic importance grows, as if Will It Blend had tried works by Margaret Atwood and Mamet. Heffron's knack for dragooning historical figures (see Mitzi's Abortion, New Patagonia) into hilariously effective duty hasn't deserted her, but here her imported personages are made mostly of straw.

A raucous opening pageant retells how the prophet Glenn Beck (complete with mythologizing, homespun song, right out of "The Ballad of Davy Crockett") withdrew from public life as a "TV soldier" to the upper reaches of an empty high-rise (the WaMu tower, apparently). Beck's mask is on top of someone's head (none of the press materials notes who plays what role), so that when the actor's head is lowered, Beck's beady-eyed grin comes at you like a battering ram.

While cackling with glee as Beck wept, I worried briefly that this was Weimar cabaret, and laughter at his neurotic displays might come to seem in retrospect ill-advised. But the play quickly dispenses with the Beck we know, the throwback radio-personality ideologue ranting about socialism and our multifarious enemies. Here he's become a reclusive, vampiric Elder, on air-sucking life-support but somehow exercising his droit de seigneur on his tower's female inhabitants. In other words, a cartoon villain with little to do with the actual Beck's weaknesses and strengths.

I think this is Erin Pike playing Pearl (Photo: Ian Johnston/Annex Theatre)

There's also a Subcomandante Sontag-type figure, Lulu, who is the runaway activist mother of teenaged Pearl; Pearl's two sisters, one of whom clings all the more firmly to Faith the more she's abused, while the other tries to serially sleep her way to the top, or at least out, of the tower; and a "brown-short" messenger (who despite the intentional "brown shirt" punning seems to side with the resistance). In a related note, the UPS driver thing is done, can we all agree?

The set and scenery, for a theatre of Annex's limited means, is sometimes jaw-dropping (the lighting is pedal-powered, if you'd like to roll your eyes briefly). Much virtue is made of necessity--lighting and shifting walls and the use of the whole theatre, front to back, generate an almost dizzying amount of settings. But too many short scenes consist of two to three people walking on, sharing plot points, and walking back off; or ending deflatedly like an SNL skit. Director McKay never finds an answer for how to maintain impetus in these moments, except to rush through them with something like cinematic jump cuts.

Whoever the actor is who plays the Beck/brown shorts role, he reminded me of Olivier plugging away through something like Clash of the Titans, except of course he's just starting out, not ending a career. He's preternaturally present, catching glances, changing intonation, and it's worth the price of admission just to see him thinking on his feet up there (not flawlessly). At times, his characterization overwhelms the scene's direction, but he has exciting ideas.

Paradoxically, the least-written role provided that emotional insight that is the reward of live theatre, when you're sitting in the seat just adjacent to this felt realization. Lulu is introduced as this disembodied voice, simultaneously high, feral, raging, and engaged intellectual, shouting over a wall of discommunication to her daughters (to do something, anything, "ACT!"), and it's piercing, the sound of motherhood, damaged and deranged, perpetually losing daughters to what men decide they want.