Terry Tempest, Guns, No Roses

 

Terry Tempest, Guns, No Roses

The Magnetic Theatre
Terry Tempest: The Final Interview by Jamieson Ridenhour
Through March 25, 2017, at Magnetic 375, 375 Depot Street, River Arts District

What's that old adage about not bringing a loaded gun on stage in the first act unless it's fired in the second act?

Asheville playwright Jamieson Ridenhour teases us with not one but two loaded guns in the first act of his new play Terry Tempest: The Final Interview, now at the Magnetic Theatre through March 25. Waiting to see when and how they get fired, and by whom and at whom, is one of the charms—and there are many—of this entertaining dark comedy.

Terry Tempest is not exactly a locked-room mystery, but Ridenhour does lock three characters in a hotel room with those guns and keeps us eagerly anticipating the inevitable fireworks. In this case, tempers as well as firearms explode.

Olivia (Hayley Heninger) is a recent journalism grad on her first big assignment for a rock-and-roll magazine in New York. She's scored an interview with a notoriously interview-averse punk rocker, Terry Tempest (Cody Magouirk). It's arranged by his manager, Joey (Pasquale LaCorte), without his client's knowledge.

Terry needs to restart his artistic life after a reclusive and troubled fifteen-year dry spell. Joey needs to restart Tempest's royalties.

Olivia's friend Stacy (Carrie Kimbrell Kimzey) tags along because they've been Tempest fans since they were teenyboppers.  Left alone in Tempest's suite at the Plaza Hotel, the two women giggle and gawp at the star's  memorabilia and even take swigs from a hip flask Stacy finds in a drawer. They also find what they call "the most famous hat in rock and roll." They've reverted to full screaming teenybopperhood, despite Olivia's reminders that she needs to stay professional.

As played with lots of brio by Heninger and Kimzey, Olivia and Stacey are annoyingly endearing. Or is that just annoying? The director, Rodney Smith, allows them to veer a little too far for credibility into Lucy and Ethel sneaking into Cornel Wilde's penthouse suite. Finding the right tone for dark comedy is always tricky.

Ridenhour knows how to pack in a lot of plot and a lot of character backstory. And he knows how to unpack it all in good Ibsen fashion, dropping hints and revealing family secrets. Olivia, Stacy, and Tempest are all haunted by tormented pasts. For the rocker, it's the death of a female bandmate. For the women, it's difficult relationships.
And Joey has his own reason for locking these three in together. It's the hinge for the final revelations and a finale that is both hilarious and harrowing. It's Sartre's No Exit, via Joe Orton, as played by the Marx Brothers.

The playwright really knows how to plant plot signposts along the way. Remember that drawer where Stacy finds the hip flask? Well, remember it. The most famous hat in rock and roll? It's a funny gimmick to get the girls offstage so Tempest can make his (much-too-long-delayed) entrance in the first act. And it's the set-up for a punch line that goes off late in the second act.

Sometimes Ridenhour stuffs so many plot, character, and thematic plums in his pie—feminist empowerment, abusive families, abusive boyfriends, low self-esteem, teenage angst, artistic burnout, curmudgeon with a heart of gold—he's in danger of becoming Little Jack Horner.

Occasionally he has to jump through hoops to explain some of his plot points. Seriously unconvincing is why a hotel room door can be locked from the outside. But without that door, his plot can't get going.

It doesn't help that set designer Kehren Barbour's door looks so flimsy Tempest could give it one good kick and they could all go down and enjoy a drink at the Champagne Bar, now that the Oak Bar is closed. An elegant Plaza suite gives Barbour a challenge she can't easily meet on what is no doubt a limited budget. Something more suggestive and less literal might have done the job.

Still, the audience happily goes along for the ride.  Ridenhour never forgets he's writing a comedy, and he keeps quips and one-liners arriving with Neil Simon regularity. 

The director, Rodney Smith, is giving Terry Tempest a spirited, if uneven production. Magouirk has such a strong stage presence we can ignore an accent that wanders from Memphis to maybe Liverpool and other points in the British Isles. At one point Pasquale drops his Damon Runyan-Broadway Danny Rose shtick for a glimpse of Joey's real desperation. And if Magouirk, Heninger, and Kimzey strain too much for laughs, they have quiet moments that hint at hurt souls. 

This ensemble is having a good time, and so are we.

Info at www.themagnetictheatre.org/  

Comments? Email: awengrowresearch@gmail.com 

Photo: Rodney Smith@ tempusfugitasheville

 

 
The Submission: Does Gay Equal Black in the Oppression Sweepstakes?

Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective
The Submission by Jeff Talbott
Through February 25, 2017, at the BeBe Theatre

A playwright is accosted on the New York subway by young toughs, who taunt him about his sneakers.  The playwright is white and gay. The toughs are black. The sneakers are so gay. 

The playwright, who has had no luck getting his plays produced, later has an inspiration. He'll write about a young black man and his alcoholic single mother struggling to get out of the projects.

The play is heartfelt. His friends tell him it's powerful.

The writer, Danny Larson, submits it to the prestigious Humana Festival of new plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which has launched many important new playwrights. To his amazement, it is accepted. This self-professed "white dude" has found his voice, and maybe his career, by channeling black lives.

But there's a problem. Danny assumed his play would have no chance under his very white-sounding name. So he submitted it as a fictitious woman he calls Shaleeha G'ntamobi. The name sounds very black, he thinks. Now he needs to hire a black actress to impersonate Shaleeha during rehearsals. 

This is the set-up for The Submission, a play by Jeff Talbott, being given its own heartfelt and powerful production by the Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective at the BeBe Theatre downtown through February 25.

The reveal comes in the third scene, as Danny, played by Jon Stockdale, tells the actress he's hoping to hire, Emilie (an assured Kirby Gibson), how his subway encounter implanted these black characters in his imagination.

Stockdale here has an actor's transparency that makes an audience see what the character is seeing. It's a low-key moment, one of the actor's best, in a play bustling with angry confrontations that can, and sometimes do, tempt actors into too much acting.

It takes awhile for this production and this play to reach this place of unforced truthfulness. Two prior scenes are teasers. First Danny anxiously watches his graduate school pal Trevor read his play in a coffee shop and pronounce it brilliant. At his apartment he tells his boyfriend that his submission has been accepted. And then he drops the bombshell that he's masked his real identify. 

If you've read any of the promos about the production, you know where this is headed and can only wish it would get there sooner. If you didn't know, you're probably more confused than intrigued.

The slow start is even slower with Danny and Trevor's conversational style. You know, er, lots of stammers, um, hesitations, broken phrases, and, like, overlapping words. That may be what the playwright asks for. If so, the director, Stephanie Hickling Beckman, could take a tip from a later scene that says playwrights shouldn't always get what they ask for.

Trevor is played by Travis Lewis as a dude's dude, two parts Jack Nicholson with a shark's smile, one part Jeff Bridges. Danny may be a little in love with his straighter-than-thou friend (Trevor drinks beer out of a bottle, while Pete drinks a glass of red wine). And Pete is jealous that Danny let Trevor read the play first. This hint of a subplot is alluded to later but doesn't develop. 

The Danny-Trevor-Pete triangle turns quadrilateral when Emilie and Trevor become a couple. One of the production's most entertaining scenes has Emilie in her hotel bedroom in Louisville and Trevor in the New York coffee shop having telephone sex. There are lots of people around him, he tells her, half embarrassed, half boastful, and  gestures towards the audience.

It's one witty meta-theatre moment of several where the playwright reminds us we're watching a play about a playwright and actors making a play. Another comes from Maximilian Koger as Pete after one of those angry confrontations. "I've had enough of actors," he says, storming out of the hotel room where Danny and Emilie have been shouting at each other.

Koger recently made a robust sailor in love with the heroine in Asheville Community Theatre's Sweeney Todd. Here he gives Pete a winsome sweetness with a sharp edge of camp. Curiously for a play written in 2011, his Pete is more Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served than Will McKormack from Will and Grace.
 
Danny and Emilie shout at each other a lot. Their arguments are the play's main dramatic strategy. Can a white man write authentically about black lives? Does a gay man's experience of oppression equate to a black woman's? And who owns the play? The white man who conceived it or the black woman who brought it to term?

At first Talbott gives his antagonists a level playing field. Emilie calls out Danny for the implied racism of the name he manufactured for his imaginary black female alter ego. He retorts that she immediately assumed the young men on the subway were black. He hadn't specified their race.

But as Danny comes out as a closet racist, and an oddly clumsy one, the balance of sympathy tips towards Emilie. Gibson portrays her winningly without an inkling of angry-black-woman stereotype.

Talbott's other dramatic strategy is keeping us in suspense about when, how, or even if Danny and Emilie's hoax will be exposed.

Beckman keeps the heat on high and the tension building. The commitment to ensemble playing she pulls from her actors is palpable. 

The director occasionally lets the pace drag  with lengthy set changes from coffee shop to apartment to hotel room to outside a rehearsal room to the stage of the theatre in Louisville. Designer Nathan Singer has created clever periaktoi that pivot and roll from place to place, but less scenery would have been more on the tiny BeBe stage. The costume design team calling themselves Justin Day gives the men understated, appropriately lived-in looking clothes, with a bright splash of fashion pizzazz for Emilie.  Her yellow dress for opening night is a knockout, and so is she.

Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective says it presents works which "confront issues of social diversity in a provocative way." With that mission in mind, Beckman, the group's artistic director, hammers the play's arguments rather than polishing its subtle satire of identify politics.

Still, she raises an often-debated question: Is it okay for a white writer to tell a black story? We heard that about Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel The Help. As Beckman welcomes the audience, there's a banner behind her announcing the company's final play of the season: Shakespeare's Othello. Is this Beckman's way of answering her own question? Or is it another way of asking it?

Information:  www.differentstrokespac.org/

Comments? Email awengrowresarch@gmail.com