The Pros and Cons of CSAs
Seattlest Pix 09Nov08
Weekly Around the -Ists
Seattlest Pix 09Nov09
Can't Miss It: Monday
Bad Monkey Productions' staging of Rebecca Gilman's Blue Surge is an uneven piece of theater: on the one hand, the technical side of the production is weak; on the other, the actors--with little to work with besides a strong script and each other--deliver powerful and moving performances which make the play definitely worth seeing.
The play follows Curt (Andy Clawson), a small town vice detective, and his partner Doug (Robert Walker) as they try to bust a massage parlor front for a prostitution ring. Curt falls for Sandy (Brenda Joyner), an 18-year-old working at the massage parlor, despite the fact he has a fiancee, Beth (Jennessa Richert-West).
Fundamentally the play is a meditation on class and power. Curt is embittered by his desperately poor upbringing, and connects with Sandy--who grew up in equally dismal circumstances--on a level he can't achieve with his fiancee, a comfortably well-off art teacher. It's a classic dilemma for an upwardly mobile young man, on the one hand marrying up, on the other, emotionally drawn back down. But as Curt's resentment gets the better of him, it also becomes a play about obsession and power. While he's never threatening to Sandy in a stalker-ish way, he does come to see himself as her potential savior, a man who can lift her out of the horrors of prostitution.
Sandy, though, wants none of it. While she likes Curt, she wants independence, freedom from the restraints of poverty; prostitution is a lucrative and simple career opportunity for her. His ultimate sacrifice falls flat on her, and the play's ending is blissfully unsentimental.
As our guest put it after the play, the actors were far more natural than you tend to expect at a small theater production. Clawson excels, giving his character a subtle vulnerability at the beginning, when Curt comes off as professional and level-headed, and achieving anger and the occasional outburst of violence without slipping into a hyper-aggressive mode, leaving Curt largely sympathetic throughout. He has great chemistry with Brenda Joyner, who plays Sandy as a smart young woman despite a lack of emotional stability.
As Beth, Jennessa Richet-West does make some strange choices for a stage play, her performance small and subtle with quietly delivered lines, which contrasts poorly with the other actors. Still, her performance is natural and believable, though she and Clawson seem to have little chemistry together.
Robert Walker also delivers a stand-out performance. His character could easily come off as creepy or pervy (after going undercover at the massage parlor, he expresses a lot of interest in anal sex), yet Walker keeps Doug safe and excusably innocent when it comes to sex. As Heather, one of Sandy's co-workers, Alyssa Keene plays mostly for laughs, which is all right as her character's development is a fairly hammy sub-plot in an otherwise tight play. (Heather and Doug wind up dating, mostly because he figures he can get anal sex out of her; eventually they fall in love and the play ends with her pregnant.)
Despite the strong performances, the play is hampered by a weak production. It would be tempting to excuse this given how small the production company is, but some of the choices were confusing (neither detective carries a gun or any other simple cop prop) and the staging was amateurish.
The script requires frequent location changes, so the production divides the stage into two playing areas: stage left is the massage parlor and the station briefing room; stage right is Curt's apartment and the bar. Because most of the play alternates between the bar and Curt's apartment, every location change requires a physical set change, which took almost a minute on average, breaking the flow and making it hard for the audience to keep engaged. There may be a good reason for it, but for the life of us we couldn't figure out why they didn't alter which playing area served for what location in order to cut down on the amount of set changes.
Runs Thurs.-Sat. till Oct. 20 // 8 p.m. // Chamber Theater, 915 E. Pike, 4th Floor // $15 advance, $18 at the door
Image: Alyssa Keene as Heather and Robert Walker as Doug, photo by Rob West
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