The Main(e) Play

Photo/Ryan Jensen

Two men stand in a living room, catching up on better times, days when actor Shane (Alexander Alioto) used to visit home and his cement-mixing brother Roy (Michael Gladis) more often than just Thanksgiving and Christmas. The room is a mess of beer and toys, and director Robert O'Hara frequently keeps it lit in the staid glow of late-late-night television. Theatrically, it's a Kodak moment that shows the history between these brothers, and its now haphazard remains. But then Shane opens his mouth, spinning an argument out of one of the many scenes that happen offstage, referring to a character (Roy's seven-year-old monster of a son) that we never see, and pulling up a history that seems more anecdotal than real: "Do you want to tell each other things, Roy?" he asks. "OK. Let's tell each other things." This is the problem at the heart of Chad Beckim's The Main(e) Play: the characters all tell each other what's happening.

Why so much exposition? Well, Mr. Beckim's excellent with language, but not with editing. In 'nami, the strong characters and desperate social situations limited what he could and couldn't say; in Lights Rise on Grace, he used monologues to build into solid scenes later, speaking directly through his cast. In The Main(e) Play, he's stuck with a bland plot and somewhat redundant characters, and his unique descriptions ("It looks like Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo had a gang bang in here") are sorely out of place. He's not helped by O'Hara, either: the play sags from lengthy but nondescript scene changes, and unessential movements -- like the up-the-aisle entrance to the house -- are overemphasized. Characters are misused, too: we could use more of Shane's old flame Jess (Susan Dahl, the only actor to really use that accent), and less of his rival, Rooster (Curran Conner's excellent in the role, but Roy makes his part redundant).

I use words like "sag" and "stuck" to illustrate that there's something worth saving at the core, and in this case it's the feeling of becoming an alien in one's own home. By making his main character an actor, he gets to play with the omnipresent illusion of theater, and when Shane exclaims that he's tired of playing pretend, it's a powerful moment. Furthermore, while the play seems as cluttered with extra scenes and unconnected rants, I've never seen Mr. Alioto so vulnerable or Mr. Gladis so solid. As Shane, Alexander is channeling the smarmy attitude from Nelson, but mixing in a real sense of loss; as Roy, Michael is threatening with just a whisper, and when he has to speak seriously, his voice is strangled with the sad sort of strength that comes from being a single father.

The Main(e) Play would be a lot stronger if it dropped the parenthetical aside in its title, and stuck to the main point. Right now, it's trying too hard to be clever: it needs to be honest first.

PLAY: "Nelson"

Partial Comfort Productions strikes again with another show about disturbed but colorful urban characters who are thrust at first into comedic situations, and then, as true life sours the illusion, straight into the nightmare of a hopeless existence. Nelson is an enjoyable bit of theater, but on second look, only Nelson's a character: the two supporting roles are devices meant to rile up and provoke him. Still, for set pieces, Joe (Alexander Alioto) and Charlie (Samuel Ray Gates) give our anti-hero, the slovenly, shy, and sad Nelson (Frank Harts) plenty of provocation, and give the audience ninety minutes of entertainment.

The result is a rough plot that lasers in on a somewhat shallow obsession of Nelson's, but those rough edges are sharp, and the office dynamics are as vibrant as they are inexplicable. It's too easy to make Nelson a whipping boy for Joe's frustration with his middling career as a film agent for unsuccessful actors, but that's exactly what playwright Sam Marks does. He never explains it either: he just presents Joe as a needling obstacle, a sadistic and shallow man. It also makes Joe a character without any wants or needs, and though Alioto jumps through the hoops well enough, it's obvious enough that he's just running in place, and when we realize that a character is never going to change, we stop caring about them.

The same goes for the stagnant friend, Charlie, who plays the stereotypical "angry black man." All that we ever learn about him is that he is a great ego and a feeling of entitlement; we also see that he's talented at self-deception, a man who can justify the murder of twelve-year-old boys simply because he's not the one who killed them directly. Gates tries to give the role some range, but his limited scenes, up to and including the climax, rob him of any real development.

As for Nelson, even though we are blatantly manipulated into feeling sorry for him (even as we are creeped out by the "skeleton" in his closet), we sympathize with his loneliness. The nagging question of the show is whether or not Nelson is simply a pathetic man--oppressed at work, taken advantage of by his friends, and abandoned at night--or if he's a killer himself, or worse. Director Kip Fagan has placed both the office and Nelson's living room in the same space, which keeps the scenes rolling from one to the next, with Nelson always torn between the two, and Harts does an admirable job of rolling with those punches. It's as exciting to see him come out of his shell as it is to see him hide within it once more. Take it as a compliment or not, but he really does have "the air of a serial killer."

Nelson doesn't manage to really surprise us, but it does manage to entertain us, and it represents a slice of life on the off-Broadway stage that a lot of companies don't bother to address. I wish that Marks had developed more of a plot so that the show weren't so wrapped up in shallowness, but at the least, his director has managed to make those shallows filled with some exciting rapids.

[First posted to New Theater Corps, 2/10]