What the Heck!
Shamrock McShane
We live in a tiny cave – my wife and I, our two year-old Oliver, our newborn Homer, and my 19 year-old son Bill – all of us packed tightly into a two-bedroom apartment at Creek’s Edge. Last week we had a Second Birthday party for Ollie’s friends, the twins, Lyle and Lavery, the children of my comrade, the historian Dirk Drake and his wife Erica, who also brought along her teenage daughter Ella. That makes ten of us – in a tiny cave. You can probably picture it. That’s something like the feeling you get with A Christmas from Heck, the new play by Rob Nash at the Acrosstown Repertory Theatre.
The most exciting event in the theatre, hands down, is the opening of a new play. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. The actors are originating the roles. Everybody is guided by their own lights. It takes balls just to decide whether you like it or not.
This is just the sort of play that Arline Greer would hate: profanity-laden, sexual situations, drug and alcohol abuse, infidelity, gun play, gender confusion, autism, Alzheimer’s, left-leaning politics. Just the sort of thing that alternative experimental theatre is all about. Apparently nobody told Director Jess Arnold, who just returned to our boomerang town after a stint in Austin Texas where she met Rob Nash, that the ART is now a “Community Theatre” – cue up Our Town and Hello, Dolly. Fortunately the play has quickly gathered a community of its own, comprised of Gainesville’s intellectual gentry – inclined to believe in evolution, global warming, and Gay marriage. People who know that Florida isn’t all that different from Texas. Afterall we’ve both been Bush-whacked.
During the first act it seems like we spend as much time in the dark as we do in the light – but it’s ok, it’s not quite dark: the Heck home is still lit with Xmas lights and we feel at home. There’s lots of dead time at Xmas anyway. That’s what comes from a culture given to waiting for Santa – someone nobody really believes in. The normal adjustments we make at such times are to drink and eat sweets, so our surrogates on stage indulge for us.
For some odd reason the light booth has been relocated to the last row of the audience, but this only contributes further to the Brechtian effect – no Wagnerian mystic chasm separating audience from actors. In fact it is to the light booth that the enormously entertaining troubadours Josh and Mabel, who do some sweet and raucous picking strumming and singing, retreat from the stage after serenading us before the show with a rousing set of original songs.
Unlike a movie where jump cuts can build a rhythm, in the theatre all a blackout does is end the play, and then it has to lurch back into gear. This can wear people out. Sometimes that’s ok. If you’re not worn out by Xmas, you must not be trying at all.
The Heck Family is trying, very trying.
Tom Miller is roaringly good as the mature good brother who pays for his maturity with a raging lust for liquor and flesh. He seems to know just what it’s like to have had a few, and then decide to have a few more. It just makes life suck when you know how things really work, that business is bad, that debt is out of control, that your wife cheats on you, and you cheat on her because you can’t help it because it feels so bad it feels good, or is it the other way around?
What just about everybody here seems to want for Xmas is to get fucked. How’s that for lifelike?
Jason Hedges is Tom’s partner in crime, because he plays his opposite number, the younger bad brother. Truth be told, they are the glue that holds the play together because both of them are able to carry a scene on their own.
The patriarch (Jerry Rose) and matriarch (Cindy Lasley) are most assuredly not the foundation of this modern American family, ditheringly well-played though they are – they are the rusty hinges on the family front door, which opens wide to reveal what we Marxists have known for a century or so – that marriage is a dead institution. What holds people together nowadays, if anything does, is the way we can exploit each other. The older brother knows this, and there’s comfort in it, comparable to what’s left in your glass.
Rose Godfrey plays a love child full of bile and fury with gusto, and when she drops an F-bomb fusillade on Pop that crescendos in “Fucking G.I. Joe here knocked up my mom!” you have to reach behind you to make sure you haven’t laughed your ass clean off.
These are middle class, working class people. They are not heroic, and neither are they villainous. All along the environs the setting includes and borders on, all along the Texas highway, there is crime, brutality, violence. There’s a police detective called Speedy Gonzalez, amiably played by Arturo Escamilla, and he’s packing heat. He’s also polite, friendly, and concerned for the Heck family, even though the patriarch seems admittedly to have entangled himself in the thick brush of Texas illegality.
What makes the play funny is not jokes or funny lines but the fact that we middle class, working class people feel right at home here with a family whose collective foolishness is naked, and besides, it’s one of the few places left where anyone can laugh unrestrainedly.
Long before we get to the intermission we know for a living fact that this family is a mess. We know it because our own is too. We’ve got our pill-poppers, our bottle suckers, our dopers, cheaters, beaters, and loopy kin, related to us either by blood or just plain bad luck.
We gather at Xmas because the season itself gathers us together, collects us like particles submitting to centrifugal force. Xmas shakes us up like gin and vermouth and pours us on the rocks.
And out come our middle class, working class feelings, hot and heavy.
Keep ‘em coming!
- Shamrock McShane |
