In a few months, Acorn Theatre is bringing David Mamet’s Oleanna to the Tampa Bay area. In most ways, it’s a terrific choice for a struggling young company. For one thing, the script itself is brilliant, addressing in a few scenes issues of gender relations, power, aggression, epistemology and political correctness.
Oleanna only requires two actors, meaning that Acorn should be able to afford the top performers who might be too costly in a more populous work. The play takes place in a college professor’s office, so the set designer won’t have to draw up a pricey, sophisticated environment: borrowed bookshelves, a desk and a lamp should be enough to situate the action. As for costumes, who doesn’t have the jeans or khakis, the plain shirt and sports coat that might logically be found on a young student and her self-absorbed professor? Oleanna is incisive and, not unimportant, inexpensive. Acorn is to be congratulated for scheduling it in its first season.
The story is different, unfortunately, with Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, Acorn’s current production at the HCC Performing Arts Hall in Ybor City. This is a play that, based on some of the less important tales of Anton Chekhov, is often shallow, redundant, trivial and just plain irrelevant.
Further, it’s a busy script that asks for 11 different sets (or a judiciously designed unit set), over 20 different costumes, and five chameleon-like actors who can transform themselves into several characters each. This isn’t a play, in other words, that cries out for revival, and it’s not one that can easily be produced well on a low budget.
So when we find ourselves dissatisfied with Acorn’s bare black stage, when we tire of the all-black outfits that the actors use for every scene, when we reflect on the performances that, while solid, are hardly iridescent – well, we can’t help but note that all these problems could have been avoided. The Good Doctor is The Bad Choice for needy Acorn and for just about any theater company. It asks too much and gives too little. It’s not even very funny.
Two of the script’s 11 scenes do manage to justify themselves, though. “The Seduction” is the story of Peter Semyonych (Dan Khoury), a Don Juan who specializes in other men’s wives (in this case, one played by Kelly Sardinas). His method is ingenious: He tells the woman’s husband (Brad Minus) how much he envies him his spouse, knowing that the man will dutifully report it to his wife. As Semyonych gradually intensifies his praise, the woman’s vanity leads her to feel increasingly vulnerable, until finally she’s ready to throw herself at this stranger who apparently recognizes her true value.
Although the scene’s perspective on flattery is hardly a revelation, there’s intelligence here, and a wise skepticism about human nature. Khoury’s deadpan delivery is at moments very amusing (“For the faint-hearted, I urge you, look away!”) and Levi Kaplan’s staging is at all times lucid.
Virtues of another sort can be found in “The Drowned Man,” a sketch in which a Tramp (David C. Baker) offers to entertain a writer (Khoury) by nearly drowning for him. For three rubles, says the Tramp, he’ll “jump into the icy cold water, splash around a bit, flail my arms, yell for help a few times, go under … and then come up floating head down, all puffy like.”
Of course, the sketch reminds us of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” and further, suggests a society of desperate, grinding poverty. Still, actor Baker is a big man who hardly looks hungry, and the yellow goggles he wears are more ridiculous than evocative. Yet there’s a resonance to the scene: a metaphorically drowning man offering to literally drown, a country where the poor must somehow manage to entertain the rich for a few scraps of bread. If every section of The Good Doctor were as provocative as “The Drowned Man,” this play might really matter.
But the other sketches are almost all distinctly minor. “The Sneeze” is a repetitive, predictable story of a civil servant (Minus) who sneezes on his supervisor’s (Baker’s) neck, and then spends far too long reminding his boss what he did and how sorry he is. “The Governess” is an equally tiresome story about a woman (Melanie Graham) who repeatedly cheats a self-effacing governess (Sardinas) out of her weekly wages, and then confesses, improbably, that her scam was only “a little joke.”
“Too Late for Happiness” is about an elderly man (Baker) and woman (Graham) who can’t manage to overcome the distance between them, and “Surgery” is a vaudeville sketch about a dentist’s assistant (Minus) who, with little experience, tries to pull out the aching tooth of an anxious sexton (Baker). (“Surgery” does include some laudable physical comedy, but like most of the others, it’s a scene without ideas).
“A Quiet War” features two elderly men (Minus and Baker) who compete – for too many minutes – over the details of an imaginary dinner, and “The Audition” is a short sketch about an amateur actress (Sardinas) who’s always says the wrong thing as she tries to get a job.
The very worst of the vignettes is “A Defenseless Creature,” about an irritatingly shrill woman (Graham) and the banker (Baker) from whom she demands help (Kaplan’s direction here is at its low ebb; this might be a memory from The Red Skelton Show). Finally, “The Arrangement” is about a father (Khoury) who takes his virgin son (Minus) to a prostitute (Graham); at least the acting in this scene is skillful, even if the sketch is lightweight.
Oddly enough, the best moment in The Good Doctor is an excerpt from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, performed by Sardinas at the end of “The Audition.” These few lines from this poignant classic have everything The Good Doctor lacks: relevance to the human predicament, beauty, depth and intelligence. Hearing these notes from paradise, I was reminded that there’s really no reason why Acorn Theatre should have to offer us a script as flimsy as The Good Doctor.
After all, the royalty payment for masterpieces is no more expensive than for clunkers, and there are more than a few great plays out there that don’t cost a thing. If Acorn is going to become a fixture in the Tampa Bay area, it’ll take more than good intentions, more even than solid acting and design; it’ll take good taste in selecting scripts – scripts not at all like The Good Doctor.
But one misfire shouldn’t matter that much. And Oleanna is coming.
So I’m still a cautious optimist – more cautious than before, I’m sorry to say – about the future of Acorn Theatre.
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2005.
