Anyone who's worked in the theater awhile knows how many things can go wrong with any production. In my sometime role as a playwright, I've seen a lead actress break her foot two nights before opening, groceries on stage roll into the audience, and thick fog cascade into an outdoor amphitheater, covering first the spectators and then the performers. I've seen actors literally beg a mysteriously laconic director to give them some guidance, and I've met an actress who wouldn't play a part correctly because it too much resembled her own personality, and she'd gotten into the theater in order to escape her personality. Of course, most of the time events in the theater don't go so bad so often. But to work in this business is to be aware that problems might come from any direction — from the writer, director, actors, set designer, costumer, lighting designer or those pivotal folk who are supposed to do publicity. And then, once you've run this gauntlet successfully, the critics descend with their pens like stilettos.
Yikes. Ouch. It's an obstacle course. And like anything fraught with the capacity for disaster, it can drive you a little nuts. Or strike you as very funny.
The late Craig Alpaugh, formerly a resident of Tampa, saw the humor in the process. In his comedy Theatre Hell, everything that can go wrong, does — from a fire in the house to collapsing sets to deranged understudies. In Alpaugh's vision, nepotism, egotism, opportunism and mental imbalance combine in one small community theater production to make a debacle 10 times the size of Lincoln Center.
This fiasco could be very funny — as it was a few seasons ago when Gorilla Theatre produced the play. But the current Venue Ensemble Theatre production (which I saw in a preview) mostly fails to get across to us the joy in this major botch-up and leaves us with that oddity, a troubled show about a troubled show. It's not very funny, not very enlightening, and makes the weaknesses in Alpaugh's script more obvious than they can afford to be. I know that Theatre Hell works because I've seen it do so, at Gorilla. But at Venue you'd never guess that Alpaugh's vision was anything special.
The story Theatre Hell tells is about Dickie Fennsworth, a British director who's hard up for a job. Speaking with producer Gregory Smuglee, Fennsworth learns of a PBS documentary he might work on, a travelogue with interviews called The Reel America. But producer Smuglee is reluctant to turn the direction over to a foreigner, unless, that is, Fennsworth will do him a favor in return. It seems that in the small town of Pleasant Valley, Kansas, Smuglee's playwright son Richard has recently finished an opus called Murder: It Hurts. The play's to be staged by the local community theater, but it lacks a director. Would Dickie be willing to take the post in Pleasant Valley — if he was guaranteed the PBS project as a reward?
Fennsworth takes the bait and moves on to Kansas. What he discovers there, in short, is that hell is other theater people. First there's the playwright, who has written a tome the size of a phone book, and who refuses to cut a single one of his sacred words. Then there's producer Helen Vainer, who believes herself to be the Andre Antoine of small town Kansas, a fearless, visionary producer on whom the future of the art depends. Playing the lead in Murder: It Hurts is Helen's son Garth, who naturally imagines himself in a class with Olivier; and playing opposite him is Gay Cross, an oversexed predator who'll sleep with anything or anyone to further her career. Add an actress who can't stop crying, the stage-frightened actor who impregnates her, and a sociopath thespian who can't bear being told what to do, and you have all the ingredients for what could be a fine farce.
But it's not, not in this production. First, Dan Khoury, the director, never establishes the velocity, crispness or precision that good farce demands. And then the actors seldom manage to convince us of their characters' reality. There are some exceptions: Randi Kosiewska-Short is just fine as the lugubrious Virginia Parker, and Elizabeth Anne Berkemer is first-rate as the hot and bothered Gay Cross. But Chad Wonderly is too young and too undimensional as director Fennsworth, Jereme Badger as playwright Richard seems like a college student circa 1966, and Rick Bronson as lead actor Garth Vainer seems so darkly serious as to make all our thoughts of comedy turn elsewhere. There are several actors — Sam McClelland as Gregory Smuglee, "Brick" as Helen Vainer, and Richard Di Pietra as George and Sam — whose performances are more mixed: They seem right for a few moments, then lose our credulity, then seem right again. But half or two-thirds of a performance doesn't make it. We need consistency from our performers if we're to believe in their world. And when that world is so poorly furnished — as is this one with Richard Traylor's rudimentary set — it just makes our experience of the play that much more painful.
Still, what's most distressing about the Venue Theatre's Theatre Hell isn't the acting or directing; it's how bad it makes Alpaugh's script look. Yes, the play has its weaknesses — some overly belabored wordplay, a lot of silly situations and a few too many running gags that run on past their youth. But the acting in the Gorilla version was so often so good that you didn't notice these defects or, better yet, counted them as virtues. A troubled production like the Venue one isn't nearly as forgiving. Watching it, you'd never guess that this same script can be hilarious. And it can be. I know because I was there a few seasons ago, laughing.
I didn't laugh much a few nights ago at Gulfport's Catherine A. Hickman Theater.
But I thought often about a playwright — much lamented — who deserves better.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2003.