A few weeks ago, I was really taken with a workshop presentation, in part because the creative team (the Splinter Group) managed to invest every thing onstage–props included–with numinous life. Printer’s Devil‘s production of Shadow Odyssey (at Theatre Off Jackson through November 5; tickets: $15 in advance / $18 at the door) achieves something similar, but it removes the stage.
This is Scot Augustson’s Odyssey, so it is a ribald, off-kilter exploration of American myth (“Where the River Styx meets Route 66″) as well as an engrossing retelling of the difficulty soldiers have in recovering a sense of home, post-war. The general outlines–Troy has fallen, Odysseus gets sidetracked on the way home, Penelope is beset by suitors–are there, but Telemachus is a tomboy called Tilly (Jonah Von Spreecken), and a seductive late-night AM radio host fills in as a siren.
The audience is seated on the inside of a something like a life-size zoetrope, half of a circus tent’s white-muslin wall in front of you and broken, you learn, into tableaux, so that disparate scenes can play out at far left and right, or traverse from one “setting” to an adjacent one. Light sources on the reverse project the shadows of live actors crisply, and, ingeniously, overhead-slide projection provides even more characters and special effects.
Jeffrey Cook designed the “environment,” Kent Cubbage the proactive lighting, and Gregory Musick the scenic backgrounds and masks. Michael White Hayes delivered the soundscape, and Rick Miller, the rollicking theme song.
Augustson’s updates of myth are sui generis, at once meta-knowing and locker-room louche, and yet motivated by traditional tale-telling: The shadow-casting is just right, the kind of theatrical magic that doesn’t transfer to film or TV. Drawings are seemingly pulled, thatched penises and all, from Attic vases.
Director Jennifer Jasper deploys the tent walls to great effect, and gets strong work from a folksy, laconic, and hardened Mark Fullerton as Audie (a shortening of Odysseus that also recalls Audie Murphy), and Stacey Plum as his home-fires-burning wife Lupe, wrestling with whether to move on or not. David Gehrman, Evan Mosher, and Shawnmarie Stanton are the troublesome suitors/Army buddies who invade the house.
An American myth is at the missing heart of Balagan Theatre‘s Less-Than-Zero meets after-school-special production of Dog Sees God (at ACT Theatre through October 30; tickets: $25 / $20 at the door), albeit incognito, since not just anyone can get licensing rights for Peanuts.
What is wrong with it is captured in the marketing copy: “Turning Schulz’s pleasant world into a scathingly-funny psychological disaster area….” Is that what other people remember Peanuts for, pleasantness?
Perhaps in the right hands, Bert V. Royal’s script could surf along with the appeal of a campy John Waters teen drama, but Balagan’s show, directed by M. Elizabeth Eller, plays more like a foul-mouthed (recommended for ages 15+) TV skit that wears out its welcome.
Where Schulz’s discomfiting humor was existential, Royal has loaded up the play with enough crises to stock a soap opera season: The play opens with CB (David Goldstein) recounting the death of his beagle from rabies, after having savaged a little yellow bird he used to play with. This “in your face” opening sets up a tedious amount of exposition as CB interviews everyone else about the afterlife.
In a too-late bout of cleverness, a character mentions how she dislikes that scene in movies where they introduce all the high schoolers by types. But this is after you’ve met “Van” (who used to carry around a blanket), a stoner Buddhist; Tricia and Marcy, the mean girls who get drunk over lunch hour; don’t-call-him-a-pig Matt, the coke-snorting anger-management case; CB’s kid sister the Gothic Wiccan performance artist; and Beethoven, who plays Chopin (Harry Todd Jamieson, Allison Standley, Amy Hill, Ben McFadden, Libby Barnard, and Bobby Temple, respectively).
As Lucy, Megan Ahiers arrives late to the scene, but delivers a stand-out, twitchy, knife-edge performance as someone who’s desperately pretending her grasp on sanity is stronger than it is. It’s compelling and well-written, and there’s absolutely no need for a Peanuts tie-in, so you wonder why Royal didn’t just write that play, and spare the pretense of simply not having written a first act where these kids were all friends.
Later, the play will switch gears to deliver an earnest anti-gay-bullying message.