7 Homeless Mammoths Wander New England is an exasperating play to which someone needs to apply a scissors.
Surrounding its perfectly stageworthy love triangle with extraneous, clunky and redundant material, the comedy is alternately tedious and charming, especially in its first act. Fortunately one of the play’s performers, Stefanie Clouse as space cadet Andromeda, is delightful to watch, and the two other main actors, Martha Wilkinson as Cindy and Kim Crow as Greer, turn in solid performances when the script occasionally permits them. But the three other parts — two cavepeople and one museum caretaker — are so unnecessary and excessive, no level of acting could possibly redeem them, and the central event of the evening — the closing down of a university museum — is trumpeted and regretted so often, you can’t help but wish that the demolition would occur immediately.
Let me save you a lot of trouble: This museum contains seven woolly mammoth skeletons and they’re all scheduled to depart. Should we care? If only we could. Do they work as symbols? No they don’t. Do they relate importantly to the rest of the action? No, no, no. But oh do we hear about them. Again and again and again and … forgive me. Like this play, I’ve lost all sense of proportion. Give me a moment to collect myself.
The best part of the plot centers on Cindy, a dean at a small New England college facing a financial shortfall. She’s also living with her lover, a former student named Andromeda, and though there’s a significant age differential, the relationship is a strong one. Then into Cindy’s home comes her former partner, cancer-stricken Greer. Cindy insists on putting Greer up, and trusts that their old amour will stay safely in the past. But Greer finds it increasingly difficult to hear Cindy and Andromeda’s sexual exclamations (she’s only one room away), and Andromeda’s not sure that Cindy and Greer don’t want back together. Andromeda’s quirky worldview proves magnetic to Cindy and Greer both, and the three women find themselves in a game of musical chairs that’s bound to break someone’s heart. Who’ll be cast out?
Now here’s the trouble: Interspersed throughout this entirely affecting plot are long segments in which two cave-people in a diorama talk like college students about homework, date rape and their first experience with Xanax, and even longer segments in which the endangered museum’s Caretaker lets us know in 40 different ways that the place is closing down in spite of the affection the townspeople have for it. That talented actor Brian Webb Russell plays the Caretaker, but we only have to hear him read three overlong letters to the editor of the local paper to realize that he’s effectively stopping the action with every word, not to mention boring us silly.
As for the cave-people in the diorama, they’re Vincent Stalba and Jonelle Meyer, and nothing they do, no trick or flourish, can make them seem anything but irrelevant and superfluous. Somebody needs to tell playwright Madeleine George that in the theater, less is more, and that she was doing just fine without these “experimental” excrescences.
Because the triangle plot is just fine, and if Cindy’s part is overwritten, still Greer is moving as she confronts not only cancer but an unextinguished love for her ex-partner. And Andromeda: there’s the theatrical jackpot. Perfectly played by Clouse, she’s a kind of post-hippie flower child, out to find the sweetness of a world too often encased in a bitter shell. She believes in spiritual teachers and reincarnation and sentimental New Age rituals that supposedly can bring peace to troubled souls. She’s unconflicted about sex, assertive in spite of her relative youth, and funny and enchanting in a deceptively childlike way. It’s not entirely clear what she sees in older Cindy, played by Wilkinson as a brusque and brash intellectual with not much of a vulnerable side. But no matter: Clouse’s acting is the high point of this frustrating show, and reason to stay in your seat.
Another strength is Karla Hartley’s intelligent direction, though she can’t manage to save the Caretaker and cave-people (or even voluble Cindy) from their lines. Sarah Stark’s costumes are fine, but Scott Cooper’s set isn’t very pleasing: a kitchenette in one area, the museum in another (looking uncomfortably vacant except for the diorama), and Cindy’s elevated bedroom in an upper corner so narrow, you’ve got to worry for anyone who sleeps there. But even this problematic set would be tolerable if the script were.
The fact is, 7 Homeless Mammoths needs a great deal of cutting. George should begin with the Cave-people, move on to the Caretaker, and then let the rest be. The result might be less daring — but it would be a lot more successful.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2013.