Jane Martin's Talking With … is half-brilliant and half ho-hum.
It's brilliant when it's most perverse — when its subjects are a fanatically religious snake handler, a neophyte sadomasochist, a baton twirler who bleeds for Jesus and a woman giving birth to a dragon. It's ho-hum when its subjects are more mundane: a nervous actress at an audition, a woman fascinated by house lamps, another actress who's just ending a relationship.
Unfortunately, most of the merely tolerable scenes are in Act One, so it's possible that you'll already have given up on the play when the really provocative scenes start. But don't lose hope. For most of Act Two Talking With … (which I saw in a dress rehearsal) is imaginative, disquieting, and strangely resonant.
Though the women it depicts live in the far suburbs of normalcy, their stories speak to our unconscious, to the place in ourselves where dreams and nightmares are born. Too bad the show's not more consistent. This might have been one very special mind-altering experience.
Talking With … consists of 11 monologues, each one spoken by a different character (and actress). No single thread connects one character with another; we move from the auditioning actress to the rodeo rider to the baton twirler with no particular logic and without much cumulative effect. Still, when a monologue works — and all of them are well staged by Anna Brennen and Robin New — the bigger picture doesn't much matter.
For example, the relatively conventional "Glass Marbles," in which Rosemary Orlando plays Laurie, a woman whose mother has recently died. Laurie remembers how her mother, upon hearing she had 90 days to live, asked her to purchase 90 glass marbles; and how, day after day, her mother let one marble fall to the floor, where she insisted that it remain. Thanks to Orlando's superb acting — at times she's convincingly on the verge of tears — the scene is a riveting description of one woman's method of coming to terms with her mortality, and with the preciousness of days.
Still, you don't really get into the meat of the evening till "Twirler," wonderfully acted by Marisa Welles. This majorette's stories start normally enough but soon segue into a bizarre religious terrain where twirlers see Jesus "and his hair was all rhinestones and he was doing this incredible singing like the sound of a piccolo." Or she tells us of the sacred twirling done on the winter solstice, naked in the deep snow, when ebony batons with razors in their shafts are given to the twirlers, and the razors "take your blood in a crucifixion."
What makes this surreal monologue so effective is the amazing Welles, who looks like one of those wholesome Midwestern girls who perform at college football games. She delivers her most outrageous lines with a wide-eyed sincerity that's chilling in its apparent innocence. If you ever suspected that there was something grotesque in the fresh-faced college rituals of a Saturday afternoon, this is the scene that will confirm your worst suspicions.
But even spookier is "Handler," a few minutes of theater that I doubt I'll ever forget. Marginal religion is again the subject here — more precisely, the handling of poisonous snakes as a test of who's got "the spirit" and who doesn't. A young woman called Caro — splendidly played by Nikki Flinn — comes out on stage with a covered basket, and, with deadpan seriousness, tells us that she's got a snake inside
Her family, she informs us, has been snake-handling for generations, some working with water moccasins, some with rattlers, some with copperheads. She evaluates the various types of snakes: "Your moccasin now, he's your good ol' boy snake. Flat out mean an' lots of get up 'n' go. Heck, they'll chase ya. They will." She talks about her methods: "There's some lay it to their face. I don't. Scares my eyes." And then she opens her basket, and pulls out … well, I won't ruin it for you.
If "Twirler" is hauntingly unreal, "Handler" is frighteningly genuine, and a reminder of the dangerous energies to be found on the religious fringe.
The scene called "Dragons" returns us to the unreal, or to that area of the unreal that lodges securely in the unconscious. How many pregnant women have wondered at one time or another about the alien growing in their wombs? "Dragons" introduces us to a woman (the talented Amy Ragg-Smith) about to give birth to a dragon, with "belly of a clam, scales of a carp, claws of an eagle, soles of a tiger."
Her labor pains are intense as she remembers her doctor's advice that she abort, and her husband's willingness to let the monster be born. At first we assume that she's speaking metaphorically, but as the scene proceeds there's less and less evidence of metaphor and more reason to believe that she is indeed carrying a dragon with "night-dark wings" and "scarlet breath." By the scene's end we're anxiously unsure of what we're witnessing, what horrific possibility, what irreversible wrong choice.
And speaking of wrong choices, the sadomasochist in "Marks" (played not quite specifically enough by Pat Fenda) wants us to believe that life was meaningless to her until an angry musician slashed her cheek in a singles bar parking lot. And the very strange woman in "French Fries" (adequately played by Gloria Bailey) makes a monument of McDonald's, a shrine to everlasting life, since "you can't die in a McDonald's no matter how hard you try. It's the spices. Seals you safe in this life like it seals in the flavor."
In these, as in all the more surreal scenes of Talking With … there's a confusion of realms, a wrong turn treated like a rebirth, a misunderstanding hailed as a revelation. In these scenes, playwright Jane Martin (a pseudonym) has an original vision, a perspective on life that we haven't encountered before, for which in fact we're unprepared.
True, only about half the show partakes of this originality. Approximately six out of 11 pieces.
Still, I'm glad I held on for the weirdest moments of Talking With …
Contact Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 305.
Talking With …
Shimberg Playhouse
Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center
1010 North W.C. MacInnes Place
Tampa
813-229-STAR
Through July 28
8 p.m. Thurs., Fri. and Sat.; 4 p.m. Sun.
$17, $13 students/seniors
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2002.