Rep’s interns tell us about the dark side

Last year, the Rep’s interns put on the first annual Lab Show. As I noted then, they put on eight miniature plays, all of them witty, most of them funny, two of them all of that and touching. In addition to the substance of the work, the boundless enthusiasm of bright young actors about to launch their careers permeated their show.

A new crop of young actors and designers, overseen by associate artistic director Sandy Ernst, opened the second, much more somber edition of the Rep Lab over the weekend in the Stiemke Theater. I missed the fun and energy of last year and the wit of the material.

The two comedies on this program, Kelly Younger’s The Can-Can and the premiere of One for the Chipper, by literary intern Adam Seidel, didn’t give the needed relief. In the former, N’Tasha Charmel Anders and Joe Kemper, connected by a string between tin-can “telephones,” couched an argument and reconciliation entirely in clichés. In doing so, they proved that clichés are, indeed, tedious. Coach Chip leads a Little League team that makes the Bad New Bears look like the St. Louis Cardinals. It’s like a Saturday Night Live sketch that runs too long and too far outside the baselines of human behavior.

Whether by coincidence or design, four of the eight plays followed a pattern of opening with the characters in mid-conversation. Gradually, they reveal or we deduce that something terrible has happened or will happen. The dramatic tension has to do with their reluctance to speak directly; we are meant to feel something looming, something that finally breaks out.

She had an abortion. He drowned his brother. Mother’s in a sustained vegetative state. Teacher poisened her students. He killed his wife and her lover. He killed his boyfriend. He died in 9/11. Bummer. Such topics, in this sort of coy structure, crammed into 15 or so minutes make for formidable writing and acting tasks. Neither the playwrights nor the actors were always up to those tasks.

The most successful of the mini-tragedies was Jami Brandli’s Normal, about the conflict between a stressed father and his exasperating 10-year-old son. The boy refuses to descend from a tree and insists on festooning himself with his mother’s scarves. Neal Easterling directed F. Tyler Burnet and young Luke Brotherhood, ensconced in a cubbyhole 15 feet up a wall, to speak to each other in absolutely real terms. Logic, not contrivance, guides their conversation to the tragic source of their tension. Both characters turn out to be more than we thought at first glance, and plausibly more.

Note that Burnet and Brotherhood talked to each other. In Steven Yockey’s Bright.Apple.Crush, Neal Labute’s Land of the Dead, Carson Kreitzer’s Parachute Silk, Dan Dietz’s Lobster Boy and even the through-the-looking-glass finale devised by the actors and designers, the playwrights require the actors to address the audience directly and extensively.

Joe Kemper, directed by Brent Hazelton, handled it pretty well in Lobster Boy, a monodrama in which the subject obsessively lectures to an empty room. At least he had a premise to work with. In the other pieces, the characters just babble at the audience within no particular context. That’s hard. Often, an uncertainty of scale crept in as the actors faced 300 or so people and weren’t quite sure how big they should be, or even whether they are acting or giving a speech. I suspect that would not have been the case if they’d had other actors to play to.

On the receiving end, having that many people simply talk at you for so long is a load. I wanted to see them play the scenes, not tell them. I wanted them to act.

This program will be repeated at 7 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. Admission is $10. Call the Rep box office, 414 224-9490, visit the Rep’s website.

 

Survey the theatrical spring with Matthew Reddin’s round-up of shows coming up in the next several months.