‘Hearts are Monsters’ at Theatre Off Jackson (Review)

I wasn’t able to get a review of Hearts are Monsters (March 4-26 at Theatre Off Jackson) up before it closed, but since this production was brought back by popular demand, maybe it will show up again.

And, if nothing else, you should probably be alerted to the work of local playwright Kelleen Conway Blanchard (author of Edith’s Head and Small Town, as well).

Hearts are Monsters sets up as an exceedingly alternate-reality Hamlet, a comedy about a dead father discovered buried under the kitchen floor, six years after his disappearance.

Nothing is typically Shakespearean: the entire cast wears heavy makeup, overdoing it on blue eye shadow and rouged cheekbones. Marcy (Erin Stewart), the nerdy brainiac with a side ponytail and naked mole rats, is less motivated to find her father’s murderer than to steal bad-boy football hero Jack (Joey Gilmore, who also rocks a toy guitar) from her aggressively pneumatic cheerleader-sister’s clutches.

Mother (Karen Heaven) does perch queen-like on a settee, throwing down cocktails and, in a slurred aristocratic drawl, reminiscing helpfully about her struggles with single motherhood: “The Social Services say you can’t feed babies tiny martinis to help them sleep, even if they like tiny martinis and hold out their little hands for them….”

Bret Fetzer scrupulously adheres to the reality of this disjointed place, which all in all, begins to feel like the semi-staged view of reality you get from an old nature documentary, just with these people instead of nocturnal bats. Blanchard’s script is stuffed–perhaps overstuffed–with seemingly effortless digressions that lay bare the souls of her characters while painting in scenery and commenting on the situation.

Let’s hear from the erect-postured Coach Snell (James Weidman), who has long and not-so-surreptitiously nursed an infatuation with Mother, as he awkwardly attempts to reach out to the troubled Marcy, who’s been acting out:

She says on Tuesday you refused to partner up with Melissa Jensen and threatened to “slam her vagina into the film projector” when she encouraged you to pay attention to the showing of LSD: A Young Woman’s Flight to Madness.

In one line, you get Snell’s solicitousness, Marcy’s too-intellectual bent (of course she’d come up with “vagina” and not one of the more usual suspects), and the hysteria of scared-straight school films.

Blanchard doesn’t stint on characterization. Even cheerleader Wendy (Erin Pike) is deliciously fractured. Her pursuit of sexiness as a lifeboat–she’d ride Jack out of town on his back if she needed to–could have left her a possessed sex doll, but Blanchard injects a current of sibling rivalry that humanizes her (and Fetzer makes the most of its culmination in an epic slap-fight).

In a review of the earlier production (from which I’m borrowing the quoted excerpts), Brendan Kiley said Blanchard’s style reminded him of “John Waters, Daniel Waters (Heathers), and Jack Hill (Switchblade Sisters, Foxy Brown).”

Style is important here–in this mode of storytelling, the façade supports the building. David Gignac’s SNL-sketch set design (a few lockers create a school), and Jennifer Hurlbert’s in-your-face costumes and makeup are of a piece with Blanchard’s effusions of wit and emotional viscera. You’re engulfed by the giddy laughter of a fever dream, as beneath the garish hyperbole, the drama of the family left behind (to splinter or draw together) plays out.