Timbuktu, USA at The New Marigny Theatre
My last column included a brief write-up of Intramural Theater’s recent production of Timbuktu, USA, but it merits a few more words as such inspired madness doesn’t grace our stages too often.
Ken Prestininzi’s absurdist comedy tells the wild story of Kelly Kilkenny, an oversexed Secretary of State, who having once been passed over as a presidential nominee, now schemes to get her nephew Bobby into the White House. To do this, she plots to marry him off to Babette Rosenquist, the daughter of a powerful senator, to cover up some homosexual dalliances of his while at West Point.
There’s a flashback to Kelly’s entanglement with a General, lotsa mentions of bodily smells & fluids, and in addition to sex & love & politics, a monkey and a horse, the latter rendered in fantastical Trojan size by props designers Josh Jackson & Ross Turner of Daggum Creative, that made a most theatrical entrance.
It all, more or less, made sense as I was watching but, in retrospect, I’m not sure I buy that Babette could be the only eligible bachelorette for Bobby nor that his marrying her would guarantee a path to the White House for him. And I defy anyone to explain the last 20 minutes of Timbuktu; if I nodded in appreciation when one character demanded “What’s going on?!”, by then it didn’t really matter as the whole show had the aura of a bad dream, intentionally so, not unlike D.C. today.
Too often, I find this wacky kind of script too hard to stomach–a little of it tends to go a long way–but Director Elizabeth Frenchie Faith met and conquered its challenges with boundless imagination. She gave her production a brisk pace that overcame the story’s occasional longueurs and didn’t allow an audience too much time to question any lapses in logic. She got all the physicality out of the script, choreographing arms and legs akimbo. She achieved a consistency in performance style from her entire cast, something more easily said than done with this kind of material. And if there was lotsa yelling, well, it was not inappropriate for this line-up of untamed crazies.
Greatly aiding Faith was a cast of winning farceurs, led by two of this town’s finest actresses.
Lauren Wells demonstrated that no matter how bizarre a character might be, she has to be grounded in some sort of relatable humanity. In her superb portrayal of Kelly, Wells sustained the script’s absurdity fabulously by, counterintuitively perhaps, making every single one of Kelly’s utterances sensible in a bone-deep manner; you could tell that Wells had broken down every word of the script to find motivation for why she was saying what she was saying (at least, I’d like to think she did). What could’ve been a one-note performance was, as enacted by Wells, endlessly inventive (her differentiation of Kelly’s older and younger selves–in posture, in movement, in speaking–was brilliant), filling out the script with maniacal glee.
Lauren Wells, Benjamin Dougherty, and Mary Langley in Timbuktu, USA (photo by Leah Floyd)
Mary Langley may have had the trickier job–to make a damaged child/woman believable and empathetic while also capturing her shortcomings. She did so magnificently by leaning into Babette’s reality and, like Wells, finding the prickly humanity in her, without a hint of condescension.
After their memorable turn in The Bermuda Can Company and, now, Timbuktu, USA, I can’t wait to see what Wells/Langley do next. Waiting for Godot? Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead? Amadeus?
Langley and Wells shared the stage with Benjamin Dougherty (Bobby), Joshua Tierney (the Senator), Becca Chapman & C.A. Munn (two frantic functionaries), Emily Laychak (Timbu the monkey), and Jon Greene (marvelous as both the pompous General and a gay hippie gardener), all of whom gave delectable performances of the most entertaining lunacy.
As outlandish as Timbuktu, USA was when I saw it a few weeks ago, it paled in comparison to the real-life headlines in the news then. Alas, in this brief span of time, with mind-boggling confirmations of Cabinet appointees, Timbuktu, USA is seeming saner and saner with each passing day.
True West at the Westwego Performing Arts Theatre through February 16
I had thought, for some reason, that Sam Shepard’s True West was a script so polished that all a director and actors had to do was figure out the blocking and it would work. Turns out, it’s more difficult to pull off. At least, pull off well.
Jefferson Performing Arts’ production of it at the Westwego Performing Arts Theatre, alas, demonstrates this. Set in a “suburb 40 miles outside of Los Angeles”, Shepard’s tale of Austin and Lee, two brothers–the former a bookish screenwriter, the latter a volatile low-life thief–should crackle as the two siblings exchange personas and Austin takes up crime while Lee aspires to cinematic success.
Instead, under the direction of Bennett Kirschner, the Founding Artistic Director of Intramural Theater, this True West takes a while to get going as Topher Johnson (Austin) and Philip Yiannopoulos (Lee) don’t imbue every single word with a vital and necessary subtext, and Kirschner’s staging too often remains static. Things improve as the action ramps up, but the requisite sense of menace is missing throughout.
This may be because Yiannopoulos, a fine actor whom I’ve enjoyed in numerous productions over the years, simply doesn’t come off as rough or tough enough at the start, and so the contrast between Austin and Lee is not as marked as it needs to be for their transformation to fully register.
Johnson may be, at first, a little more weird than nerdy, but, ultimately, fares better as a feral streak emerges and he recalls a fantastical exploit of their father involving false teeth and chop suey in a border town.
Topher Johnson and Philip Yiannopoulos in True West (photo by Rhys Lombardo)
Olivia Winter’s set evokes the proper suburban milieu, but it’s too big (admittedly, the theater’s stage is a wide one) and so deprives the production of a more claustrophobic atmosphere that would be appropriate as the brothers keep getting on each others’ nerves.
At least the supporting roles are well done. As Saul, Joshua Tierney epitomizes a hustling Hollywood producer (tho, m’thinks, deal-making in L.A. has changed a lot since True West premiered in 1980). And award-winning playwright/actor Deb Margolin, Kirschner’s real-life mother, scores a bull’s-eye as Lee & Austin’s mom who returns home from an Alaskan cruise to find her home in topsy-turvy disarray; Margolin’s perplexed normalcy, in contrast to the brothers’ strangeness, is priceless.
If I had my reservations about this production, it was still heartening to have a Shepard work done here, as he’s a playwright who appears on local stages too rarely. Hmmm…perhaps for the next True West, Lauren Wells and Mary Langley should play the siblings.
[For tickets and more info, go to https://www.jpas.org/performance/true-west/]
