Readers of this column have several times heard me complain about a certain tendency in the contemporary theater: the assignment of multiple roles to a single actor. The problem is, this choice usually has nothing to do with art; it's all about finance, about the theater saving money by paying only one actor to play three roles, or five, or 10.
Might there ever be a time when this multiple role-playing could be effective? Sure, when the playwright's point has something to do with the multiplicity of human character, identity crisis, or our ability to retain images of the Other in our unconscious. But, in Stones In His Pockets at American Stage a few weeks ago, there was no convincing reason why the actor who played a poor Irish workingman should have also played the wealthy American film director who hires him. And in The Turn of the Screw at American Stage a little while ago, there was no half-good reason why the actor who played the master of a mysterious mansion should also play its housekeeper. As it turned out, both productions were successful — just 'cause there's no aesthetic sense to it doesn't mean it can't be done well — but one couldn't help but overhear the basso ostinato of the subtext: to save money, to save money, to save money. And one couldn't help but feel that these plays would be more satisfying if there were as many actors on the stage as there were roles.
Which brings me to Fully Committed, a play in which one actor plays approximately 40 — that's right, 40 — characters. I first saw the play about a year-and-a-half ago, at Sarasota's Asolo Theatre, and at the time I congratulated the actor Kraig Swartz for making the comedy seem to be about the cacophony of modern life, the retention in our psyches of all the screamers, abusers and blackmailers we have to put up with in the course of an urban day. But in the current production, at the Jaeb Theater of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, actor John McGivern — following the script's instructions more closely than did Swartz — makes most of his characters into such extreme caricatures, we can't easily find the relevance to our own experience. And so we're left face-to-face with the one-man-plays-many strategy and its limitations: its artistic irrelevance, its willingness to substitute bravura performance for truth and substance, its tendency to become an old joke after just a short time.
Watching McGivern play 40 characters is exhilarating for 10 minutes and exhausting for an hour-and-a-half; I felt relieved when the play ended, conscious that I'd just seen a tour de force of a kind, but a hollow one. Played McGivern's way, Becky Mode's script gives us nothing to think about, nothing to feel except: isn't that actor amazing! 40 characters! And at high speed! It's virtuosity without meaning, like a particularly difficult circus act. There should be more to the legitimate theater than this.
The story Fully Committed tells is about a reservations-taker named Sam at a posh and popular New York restaurant. As the play begins, Sam arrives in the restaurant basement (where the phones are) to discover that his partner Sonya is looking after her sick father, and the reservations manager Bob is stuck on the Long Island Expressway. So there's no one but Sam to field the scores of calls that come in from customers like Park Avenue socialite Mrs. Vandervere, Naomi Campbell's personal assistant Bryce, iron-willed matron Carolann Rosenstein-Fishburn, macho chef Chef, unpredictable maitre d' Jean-Claude, and Sam's own mild-mannered Dad. As the play progresses, the callers become more insistent, unmanageable, threatening. And in the midst of it all, Sam, a would-be actor, makes phone calls of his own, trying to get his agent to speak to him, and rival thespian Jerry to shut up.
The action is fast, the callers are exigent, and the actor who plays all these parts has to switch gears every few seconds, and then switch gears again. It requires terrific timing — and John McGivern, who was very funny some months ago in Shear Madness, definitely has that.
But McGivern, as directed by Ethan Sandler, also tends to exaggerate the features of almost every caller he impersonates, until we're left with a hardly credible menagerie of freaks. After just a few minutes of Bryce's super-effeminate cackle, Rosenstein-Fishburn's doomy commands, Chef's testosterone-drenched swagger and Jerry's nasty "commiseration," we realize that what we're mostly missing here is human beings. And McGivern's most typical comic gestures — scrunching up his face, thrusting his pelvis, and scratching his butt, among other oft-repeated moves — all begin to merge after awhile into one super-sized caricature, humankind as a silly bunch of reflexes.
Of course, it's not McGivern's fault that Mode's script inevitably becomes redundant, with only the occasional surprise once we've grasped the basic premise. But he and director Sandler might have shown us — at least occasionally — the hearts of these many characters, and not just their fat heads. If the objection is raised, McGivern is being faithful to Mode's stage directions, I would have to reply, sometimes playing against a text is the best way to honor it.
Still, I'll have to admit that even toward the end of Fully Committed, McGivern could still occasionally make me laugh. Spinning around indefatigably in the wonderfully realistic, cluttered set (uncredited in my program), he here and there added unexpected color to the play, reminding me again of his considerable comic gifts. Some credit, too, should be given to Zachary Moore, whose sound design — a veritable symphony of ringing telephones — is an integral part of the play. Shelley Bradshaw's lighting is fine except when maitre-d' Jean-Claude is on the phone — at which time, for no discernable reason, many of the lights suddenly go out. I suppose this is some sort of comment on Jean-Claude's character; but I honestly can't figure out what that comment is.
As for this version of Fully Committed, well, that's easier to designate: terrific at first, tedious eventually. A great showcase for an actor; not so great for an audience.
Hey, even Carolann Rosenstein-Fishburn has got soul.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2003.