Eventually, most artistic directors learn that there's no substitute for good programming. Just look at some of the plays coming next season to Jobsite Theater: Martin McDonagh's much-celebrated The Pillowman, David Rabe's brilliant Hurlyburly, as well as works by such heavyweights as Jean-Claude van Itallie, Alan Ayckbourne and Neil LaBute. A lineup like that makes it seem smart to buy a ticket, maybe even become a subscriber.
But it wasn't always that way: In its early years, Jobsite scheduled lemons like Christie in Love, The History of the Devil and Waiting on Sean Flynn, dramas that made you wonder why you ever bought a seat. Well, times change, and theater producers change with them. Jobsite's choices for next season are so intelligent and promising, any genuine dramaphile just has to be excited. Slow start or not, Jobsite is now one of the most important theater companies in the Tampa Bay area. The difference is programming: Jobsite plays are plays that matter.
I wish I could say the same about Gypsy Productions. This St. Petersburg-based outfit, focusing mostly on shows about gay experience, has again and again scheduled third- and fourth-rate works right next to dramas of substance. So yes, Gypsy brought us the seminal Boys in the Band, the heart-wrenching Bent, the remarkably candid Slap and Tickle. But it's also responsible for disasters like Sordid Lives, A Queer Carol, and Corpus Christi.
Of course, Gypsy is young, and it may not yet have occurred to artistic director Trevor Keller that there's never a time for mediocrity. Inferior work naturally breeds skepticism: If the commitment at Gypsy isn't on quality first and always, why go there instead of Jobsite, Stageworks or American Stage? The damage is particularly severe when the theater offers an unknown drama. Why should we attend when we can't trust Gypsy's taste?
With Women Behind Bars, the company has done it again. Just a few weeks after the relatively impressive Blackout, Gypsy is offering one of the worst plays of the year — one of the worst that I've ever seen, for that matter. Tom Eyen's 1975 "comedy" may have been risqué 30 years ago, and its parody of old prison movies may have once seemed campy and knowing, but here in 2006 it comes across as witless and boring.
This is a show without saving graces: The two or three artful performances are mostly smothered by the surrounding wretchedness, and the nicely achieved prison set, by Keller and Joseph Alan Johnson, is the vessel for so much tedious stage business that it eventually becomes hateful. I only wish that my job didn't require staying for both acts; if ever I was tempted to walk out of a show, this was it.
Gypsy, what were you thinking?
I hesitate to recount the plot because I don't want to suggest that there's any meaningful story here, any suspense, any interesting characters. Nonetheless, the play takes place at the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, where seven noisy and vulgar women attempt jailbreaks, bicker with each other and reminisce about punishment in the feared "Section 10."
Ruling the roost is the Matron, an all-too-familiar caricature who pushes her considerable weight around with the prisoners and with her assistant Louise. Into this hoosegow comes innocent Mary-Eleanor, a woman convicted of an armed robbery that her uncaptured boyfriend actually committed.
Within minutes of her arrival, Mary-Eleanor is raped by her fellow prisoners, then tricked into sex by the leering, merciless Matron. But at the moment of truth, it's not the Matron who Mary-Eleanor sees; it's her lover, Paul (gratuitously nude), who will later be stripped bare by the sex-starved inmates (in case you missed any body parts the first time).
Let's just say that it gets much worse for Mary-Eleanor from here on. If this sounds at all promising, I've failed to describe it properly. The main problem is that the clichés of old prison movies don't need to be lampooned: They're already ridiculous in their original setting. So aside from some explicit sexual activity and language, a parody like Women Behind Bars has little reason for existing.
The other problem is the acting. Only three of the show's 11 performers have the charisma to make their roles worth watching; the others just overdo everything, and overdo it often. But speaking of the best: There's Naomi Welsh, who as Mary-Eleanor has an almost Brechtian ability to seem innocent at the same time that she mocks her own character. Excellent, too, is Claire Lockeyear, who as southern Blanche seems to be wondering how she ever landed in Women Behind Bars when her natural home is A Streetcar Named Desire. And Lisa Ruzzi as Cheri, a redheaded sexpot who can't keep her hands off her breasts, also turns in reputable work. She doesn't have much to do, but she does it poutingly and with style.
The other seven actresses take their jobs much too seriously and never attain Welsh's irony or the nutty realism of Lockeyear and Ruzzi. Playing several male characters, Christian Maier just seems goofy and out of place; the glimmers of talent that I noticed some weeks ago in Acorn Theatre's Servant of Two Masters just don't glimmer for him here.
Joseph Alan Johnson's direction isn't too bad when one considers what a miserable script he had to work with; and the prison costumes, by Keller, Daryl Epperly and Debbie Tillotson, are actually rather convincing. Finally, David Hershman's sound design is one of the best things in the show. I wish I could have listened to it without the play interrupting.
And so Gypsy Productions continues to pair each good show with a bad one, each gem with cheap paste. I only hope artistic director Keller will learn, as his peers at Jobsite did, as his counterparts at Hat Trick Productions are still learning, that you can balance a thoughtful, serious play with a silly, light one, but not with dramatic garbage.
If Gypsy really wants to show up on Bay area theatergoers' radar, it'll have to establish a reputation for good work. Consistently. With the shows we know and the ones we've never heard of.
Then St. Pete's "Theatrical Alternative" might really come to shine a light on the local arts scene.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2006.