INTRODUCTION. A few years after moving, a family has yet to unpack their stuff. This doesn’t suggest laziness as much as it represents emotional baggage. Each character in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s black comedy unpacks emotional baggage in their own peculiar way.
WHAT'S IT ABOUT? 11th grader Rachel Stein’s (Tara Coffey) attitude towards life stems from events on 9/11. Her father, Arthur (Chris Bange), only just escaped from one of the Towers. Sixty-five of his financial service colleagues didn’t. As a result, her family leaves New York for peace and quiet. Since then, a potent mixture of PTSD and survivor’s guilt have put him in a tailspin. He neglects his matrimonial and paternal duties.
Arthur’s emotional estrangement sets off a chain reaction. Rachel’s mother Sylvia (Jennifer Richardson) embraces religion. Like a life-sized invisible friend, Jesus (Charles Denton) even follows her around. Rachel's dysfunctional family life accounts for her cursing, her black eye shadow, and her stop the world and let me off demeanor.
Nelson Steinberg (Matt Avery) is her class mate. He dresses like Elvis and does a pretty mean musical imitation of the King, even if it means he gets beat up and ridiculed at school. Nelson introduces Rachel to the writing of Steven Hawking (Charles Denton). The recently-deceased British astrophysicist appears when she gets stoned. She falls for the purity of science the way her mother fell for the purity of religion.
When Sylvia interprets/misinterprets something she coaxed out of Jesus, all hell breaks loose. By story’s end, we learn that there’s more to life than religion, science, and celebrity culture.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? People don’t worship religion, they fetishize it. Ditto with science and, especially, celebrity culture. By satirizing these behaviors, this production get us to acknowledge and then laugh at it.
WHO SHOULD SEE IT? Any who likes satire, bittersweet domestic dramedies, and wonderfully drawn/beautifully enacted characters.
WHAT SHOULD I FOCUS ON? This production hits the trifecta of stellar story, efficient direction, and outstanding ensemble performances.
Story. Minus Arthur’s backstory, the production would just satirize our Propensity to Deify (PTD). With it, Laufer’s story becomes more layered and nuanced. (Think of the moment in the film Harold and Maude when we realize that Maude’s eccentric actions derive from a tragic context. A glimpse at her tattooed concentration camp number, never explicitly mentioned, gives an otherwise funny story an air of gravity and monumentality.)
Direction. This a story of coping. Each character has a coping strategy. Arthur, alienation. Sylvia, religion. Rachel, science. And Nelson, Elvis worship. Lopes makes us realize these strategies are all red herrings. Having to metaphorically go to the end of the world to find out, the characters learn that salvation comes from something else.
Ensemble performances. By playing his Arthur ultra-low-key like Steven Wright doing a comedy sketch, Bange pulls off an almost impossible feat. He makes his character’s depression funny without making it seem disrespectful. Avery’s Nelson makes Elvis vulnerable and sincere. Imagine Napoleon Dynamite channeling Elvis Presley. Richardson’s Sylvia relationship to Christ is not some woozy abstraction. She loves/follows/worships Denton’s Christ as if she were a groupie and he was one of the feature acts at Woodstock. With her miraculous transformation from surly Goth to science Geek, Coffey’s Rachel resembles a cross between Mary Badham’s Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Christina Ricci’s Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family movies.
THE VERDICT? It’s touching, if not profound. It’s humorous, if not irreverent. It’s topical, if not timeless. Just go see it now.
HOW DO I VISIT? Performances are Friday, April 27 at 8:00 pm (Opening night). Saturday, April 28 at 2:00 pm. Saturday, April 28 at 8:00 pm. Tuesday, May 1 at 8:00pm. Wednesday, May 2 at 8:00 pm. Thursday, May 3 at 8:00 pm. Friday, May 4 at 8:00 pm. Saturday, May 5 at 2:00 pm. Saturday, May 5 at 8:00 pm. Tuesday, May 8 at 8:00pm. Wednesday, May 9 at 8:00 pm. Thursday, May 10 at 8:00 pm. Friday, May 11 at 8:00 pm. Saturday, May 12 at 2:00 pm. Saturday, May 12 at 8:00 pm. The show runs until May 12th. Tickets are $15.00 - $20.00. The Theatre is located at University Theater at CSULB, 7th Street and East Campus Drive. For more information, visit here.