Tag Archives: tommy smith

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Does “Demon Dreams” Sound Like Family Fare?

(Photo: Larae Lobdell)

There are those who are of the mind that children’s theatre should be the best sort of theatre, the most entertaining and highest quality. The sad reality is that children’s theatre is occasionally a dumping ground for sub-par efforts.

But the Ethereal Mutt production of Demon Dreams (at West of Lenin through November 10; tickets) does not need to be sub-par children’s theatre. Despite a large amount of simplistic verse that suggests an attempt to bridge conventions of hip-hop and kabuki, Tommy Smith’s script shows promise. In the hands of the right director that promise might well be realized, but AJ Epstein is not that director at this time.

The plot of Demon Dreams consists of a showdown performance of Japanese-inspired fables between three demons and the three women who seek shelter in their hut. The threads of the fables and their frame are smartly woven, but played with the broad style of acting endemic in children’s theatre. This almost works for the demons. Matthew Aguayo, Chris MacDonald, and Carter Rodriguez are freed to play and do so with strong commitment. Epstein has hamstrung Susanna Burney, Sara Peterson, and Heather Persinger with a calm, ethereal style that does not lend itself to the precise, shape-shifting transitions required by the script nor Smith’s awkward attempts at hip-hop.

Initially the hip-hop breaks suggest the weak rap of the Witch from the Sondheim/Lapine musical Into The Woods. Repeated forays into the form do not improve the impression, and by the third iteration we’ve stopped listening to the content in favor of cowering till the ordeal has passed. This is not entirely a problem of writing. Carter Rodriguez, who directed the music and created the instruments, manages to make the language and rhythm of his number entertaining. His unexpected syncopation works against the prevailing metric structure, reminiscent of Dr. Seuss or the white politician rap of the Warren Beatty film Bulworth.

The accompaniment to the verse is all live percussion using props and the minimal set pieces. A metal belt used as a kind of chime is especially clever and key phrases break into melody. This is all reasonably effective and pleasantly homespun but needs a stronger rhythmic grounding and more confident vocal performance.

Demon Dreams’ largest failure may be in its marketing. The form, content, and running time all suggest a work that invites the attention of families but it is marketed and run as typical theatrical fare with an 8:00 p.m. curtain. There are no scheduled matinees. All this would be forgivable if the production lived up to its potential as an entertainment accessible to all ages. Instead Smith, Epstein, et al., have opted to talk down to their audience, delivering children’s theatre style in an adult setting.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Tommy Smith’s White Hot Hope You Can’t Believe In

White Hot, playing at Fremont’s West of Lenin, closes February 11. Tickets here. 16 and over.

So Bri, who is also director Braden Abraham, filling in for Tommy Smith, says to his wife Lil, or at her, she’s more of an accidental audience to his narcissistic monologue, that this guy he knows has written this story about thoroughly unlikeable characters, and even worse, there’s no optimism at all, none, and you have got to have optimism.

This is, as they used to say, rich coming from Bri, who is as short on hope as he is on empathy. He’s manipulative, deceptive, self-serving–Abraham has him wearing that precisely groomed non-beard peculiar to narcissists, and speaking with an affectless tone that means to sound “reasonable” but instead indicates that the person to whom he’s speaking is beneath contempt, or any other emotion, for that matter.

This is playwright Tommy Smith letting you off and back onto the hook. Yes, these aren’t likeable characters. No, it’s not going to be redemptive. But it may be, in its overheated, brutalizing way, truthful about the way we singe each other, scar and bruise. Intimacy here is just a way of saying “in harm’s way.”

Bri–who is damaged and unaware–stands in counterpoint to Sis, who is damaged and all-too-aware of it. Coarse, coked-up, and profane, Sis is played to the balls-deep hilt by Hannah Victoria Franklin, as a fleshy, tigerish, all-consuming emptiness in search of sensation. As her name implies, she’s the sister of Lil (Kimberly Sustad, whom you may know from such TV shows as Alcatraz and Supernatural), but she’s also an alter-ego: Where Sis motormouths her way through frighteningly hilarious riffs on the aftermaths of anal sex and birth, Lil feebly tries to “reclaim” her power from the abusive Bri by reciting self-help formulations.

Smith’s script feels written in a white heat–a step ahead of any restraining impulse. Mid-past-century concerns with “alienation” are here replaced by unapologetic pathology; there’s no attempt to pretty things up. If these characters are a little too completely their worst selves, that’s actually the point–it’s the worst selves who are most implicated when, for instance, Bri and Lil confront pregnancy, and the prospect of radically caring for another person intrudes upon their psycho(tic)drama. If a mythical normal person’s self-interested reservations and reluctance coalesced into corporeal form, you’d have Bri and Lil. If their hungers and self-destructiveness did, you’d have Sis.

That’s why, perversely, there is and isn’t hope in this world, and why the delivering angel-slash-possibly-Ukrainian-thug Grig (the awesomely-voiced, granitically impassive Ray Tagavilla) has come not to bring peace, but a kind of sword. From an egocentric perspective–and what else is there?–there is no such thing as transcendence, evolution. Just an endless line of unremarked upon graves of the people who had to die so that you could be who you are today.

The production–spare enough to fit into West of Lenin’s black box space–features a couch, blood spatter, “contemporary” costuming by Jennifer Zeyl, a geometric screen backdrop by Andrea Bryn Bush (supplemented by blasts from light tubes, with lighting by Jessica Trundy), and a jarring, scratchy noisescape by Emily Fassler. It becomes a place where you are unsure what comes next, and audience members jump visibly and cry out involuntarily.