GAL PALS: Hanna (Victoria Williams) stands shoulder to shoulder with her islandmates.
Diana Leavengood
In publicity for Lourdes of the Flies, local playwright Bill Leavengood says that the play began as an entertainment for adolescents, but eventually became so raunchy, he decided it was better suited to adults. I think he had it right the first time. The slightly racy jokes, the breakdown of characters into popular and unpopular, the football hero who turns out to be gay, the school administrator whose libido suddenly erupts — all these might seem audacious to a teenaged audience, but not to grown-up spectators with jobs and marriages and children to worry about, and last night's episode of Breaking Bad to reflect upon.
Nor is there any weighty metaphor here, as in the show's namesake, William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The subject of that acclaimed novel was the conflict of order and savagery in the human spirit, while the subject of Lourdes is nothing more than high school politics and the tendency to form cliques. There are few memorable lines, the humor is seldom humorous, and even the most sympathetic character — Lourdes herself — is not very interesting. Leavengood is usually one of the best writers in the Bay area — his Florida Crackers is a wonderful play about the Gulf Coast drug trade, and his Webb's City is a warm look at one of our region's wildest entrepreneurs — but Lourdes is a minor piece, and not very original. Watching it, you'd never guess how talented its author really is.
The play begins with six high schoolers — Lourdes, Hanna, Simmons, Tess, Vita and Natalie — on a cruise with their adult supervisor, Ms. Clincher. When Clincher tries to put out a cigarette in somebody's flammable acne cream, the ship's boiler room explodes and our heroines are thrown onto a subtropical volcanic island. Here they struggle with nature and each other — there's a lot of silliness on the subject of giving CPR — and eventually divide into separate factions.
The stuck-up cheerleader in-group is led by blonde Hanna, and the geeky but honorable out-group is led by Lourdes. But this is not the unfocused Lourdes most of her schoolmates are used to. Now that she's no longer on her anti-anxiety medication, she turns out to be a competent, intrepid and sharp-witted explorer, the natural love object of the one straight guy who's also on the island. There's some inessential business about a box of tampons, there are changes of fashion among the shipwrecked, and there's the surprise appearance of football hero Brons, who's hot for Billy but not making any progress. Despair sets in as the castaways learn that their island is owned by Donald Trump, who never visits. And when our favorite character is drugged back into a state of incapacity, we're asked to wonder (not that we do) if any of these kids will ever return to civilization.
The acting in the show is just adequate in most cases, with perhaps the best performance belonging to Michael Vestergaard in the role of Ms. Clincher. It's not at all clear to me why Clincher is played by a man (cathartic for high schoolers?), but Vestergaard handles the assignment with real professionalism and just the right amount of self-restraint. The other performances are less prismatic, which probably is as much the fault of the script as it is of the actors. Snobbish Hanna is written as a two-dimensional narcissist, and Victoria Williams plays her precisely in that manner. Holly Weber as Tess comes across only as a slightly less powerful Hanna, and it's not the least bit clear what we're supposed to think about Tamara Austin's Natalie. Patricia Yeazell has a certain gravitas as Lourdes, but she never really blossoms in the way the script wants her to, and her allies Simmons (Isabella Menna) and Vita (Anastasia Cobb) are hard to make out altogether. The two men in the play — Alex McGreevy as Billy and Garrett Schulte as Brons — are little more than cartoons, as written and as played. At least T. J. Ecenia's island set is fun to look at, and Amy Cianci's costumes for the Hanna clique are nicely inventive.
So I'll say it again: this should be promoted as a play for adolescents. The subjects it addresses are the ones teenagers deal with every day, and its fundamental attitude, for all its satire, is thoughtful and compassionate. To see it at age 15 might even prove cathartic.
But then there's college and adulthood. And a different set of problems.
And on those we want to hear from a different Bill Leavengood.
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2011.