Embedded in the ungainly mess that is Aunt Dan and Lemon is a provocative monologue about the evil that people and whole societies do. According to this monologue — which mostly comes from the character Lemon, but in part is expressed by her teacher, Aunt Dan — civilized people mostly live their quiet, lawful lives by allowing their governments to do violence to unwanted insiders — for example, criminals, or Native Americans — and outsiders — for example, the North Vietnamese. The monologue further asks if the Nazi treatment of the Jews was really so exceptional, or if rather it was just another example of a nation trying to eliminate those elements that threaten its view of a desirable society. The monologue goes even further: it asks if part of our animal inheritance isn't the love of murder, and if compassion isn't a feeling that we only seldom really feel. In sum, the monologue asks, are we genuinely as innocent as we like to think? Are we really so distant from the butchery that we claim to abhor?These are tough questions, and, given the sorrier facts of world history over the last hundred years, they're worth confronting. But unfortunately for the playgoer, these problems are posed in a theater piece that's so poorly made, they can too easily get lost in the general disorder. The irony is that author Wallace Shawn is a formidable writer of monologues — as he's shown in The Fever and in The Designated Mourner — and he doesn't need conventional drama in order to get and hold our attention. But drama he gives us in Aunt Dan and Lemon, meaning a plot that seems thin and erratic, characters who don't justify their claim on our attention, and dialogue without anything like dialectic. Add the flaws in the acting, direction and set in the current Dog & Pony production at Tampa's Gorilla Theatre, and you've got a badly troubled show, powerful monologues or not. As a spectator who saw me with pad and paper asked me at intermission: "What's this play about?"
It's about (as far as I can tell) a young woman named Leonora, or Lemon, and her parents' friend Danielle, or Aunt Dan. Lemon informs us that when she was only 11, Aunt Dan used to confide in her all the sordid details of her past. Then we see Dan as a participant in something resembling group sex, and Dan as friend to a woman who murdered a man in her bed. It's also about Dan's respect for Henry Kissinger; so we see Dan defending Kissinger's Vietnam policies to Lemon's mother, who, with varying degrees of inarticulateness, tries to argue in favor of human pity. It's about Lemon's father, who has an isolated monologue about the tense world of the executive. It's also about a certain Mindy, who finds sex cause for mirth when she's not killing her partner, and about several characters so minor that to even list them is to misrepresent their importance. Finally, and to my mind most importantly, it's about Wallace Shawn putting some of his most unspeakable musings in the mouths of characters whom he supposedly despises. So add disingenuousness to the rest of Aunt Dan's failings.
Few of the actors in this morass rise high above the material. The one exception is Barbara Eaker, who as Lemon serves as both narrator and tour guide, introducing us to the play's major themes and naming the scenes we're about to witness. Eaker's British accent isn't quite convincing, but everything else about her is: She's cool and cruel and at times seems the mask behind which lurks a festering evil.
Then there are the actors who turn in solid work but still can't make the play better than it is: Linda Slade as Lemon's mother and two other minor characters, Jason Audette as sex-crazed Andy, Jacqueline Raposo as purchasable Mindy and John Lafree as would-be Don Juan Raimondo. But Karla Hartley, for all her command of Aunt Dan's long speeches, never shows us the charisma that supposedly makes Dan so essential to Lemon and her parents, and Jim Wicker in three roles never truly seems to belong to the world of the play. (A note: with several actors playing multiple roles, it's not always easy to figure out who's who.) When a script is as badly constructed as this one, the director is needed to solve a hundred problems; unfortunately C. David Frankel manages to solve few of them. Hartley's set is rudimentary — nothing more than a few old pieces of furniture on a bare stage — but Connie LaMarca Frankel's costumes are fine. And Beau Edwardson's thoughtful lighting almost unifies the scattered action.
Aunt Dan has a reputation for offending its audiences, but I think the only thing about it that's really offensive is its insistence that it's a completed work, worthy of our scrutiny. I'm a fan of Shawn's works — I've highly praised two of his plays that Gorilla Theatre brought us before this one, and I'm still waiting for a good production of the wonderfully disturbing Marie and Bruce. But I can't like Aunt Dan; it comes across as a spotty, unsuccessful early draft, and I want to recommend to the author that he drop most of the characters, lose the weird and unconvincing suspicion of sexuality, and save the main monologues, which is where the real matter lies. Reconceived and rearranged, this could be a riveting evening of theater.
As it is, the play leaves us bored and confused.
And though we've come to expect Wallace Shawn to make us uncomfortable, boredom and confusion are the wrong sorts of discomfort.
Love's Labors Won. What's so impressive about I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change is how honest it is about love and its discontents. In this mostly delightful musical, lovers are beset by anxiety, impatience, wishful thinking, ennui, egotism, neediness, indecision, skepticism and panic — and that's just Act One. Joe Dipietro's book and lyrics are witty, Jimmy Roberts' music is catchy, and the four performers — Heather Krueger, Shelly Trocolli, Jonathan Van Dyke and Mark Raumaker — are simply endearing. This isn't love out of a Disney movie, this is the real thing, from self-doubt on a first date ("I've got baggage, emotional baggage, a planeload of baggage") to two old geezers meeting at a funeral (and rhyming "arthritis" with "bronchitis").On Michael Chamoun's simple blue set studded with stars, we watch lovers in every phase of a relationship dealing with the problems characteristic of that stage. So (for example) there's a first date in which the men are going on endlessly about their passions — aerodynamics, golf — while the women attempt heroically ("No thought tonight has he repressed") to seem as if they care. There's the woman whose date actually calls her when he said he would, and who receives for her endurance a statuette of a cell phone. There's the married couple, who after ascertaining that a hundred or so chores have been done are shocked to discover that it's not even 10 o'clock ("I'm married, and I'm gonna have sex!"). And there's a divorced woman incredulously making her first dating video: "I have children; isn't that attractive?" There are serious moments: a bored wife asking "What?" after her husband of 30 years confesses his abiding love for her, and that divorcee closing her taping with the plaintive "So choose me, Mr. Video Man."
But the prevailing winds are satirical, and you'll find much to laugh about. Yes, a few of the scenes are duds, but those are the exceptions. Mostly, this is the perfect date play (it's so honest) — or else it's the worst possible date play (it's so honest). All that remains is to praise director and costume designer Rick Criswell; he's put together a fine show.
See it with someone you'd like to know better.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weekly planet.com or 813-739-4800, ext. 4860.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2004.