July 2006

Satellite Theater

By Shamrock McShane

David Nehls and Betsy Kelso are the writing team behind The Great American Trailer Park Musical, playing this summer at the Hippodrome State Theatre. These swell kids had their eyes on the prize and they followed their dream all the way to New York City, where The Great American Trailer Park Musical was "the smash hit of the 2004 New York Theater Festival."

Juvenile, sophomoric, awful — it can't miss.

Next stop, Broadway! Well, Off–Broadway. Next stop, Hogtown. This is the United States Regional premiere.

The play takes place in Starke, Florida. It might be revealing to put the for–real Starke on stage. Another time perhaps. This Starke is just for fun. The play is essentially without a plot, lurching from one cliché of lowlife Americana to the next like piling items in the cart from the clearance bin, and admits as much. "I feel a dream sequence coming on," the chorus announces.

It's the same every summer. The Hipp presents its weakest work and the audience goes gaga.

Well, not always. Occasionally the Hipp will try to buck the trend, as it did a few years ago with the edgy Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and the rural populous struck back with a vengeance, staying away in droves.

The Hipp presents good and serious work all year long and scrambles for an audience. Then in the summer, the Hipp puts on cheap tawdry entertainment and the masses flock to it, can't get enough of it. It's like junk food.

Junk food comes in for a lot of play in The Great American Trailer Park Musical, so does Oprah, so does Jerry Springer, and more lowlife topical references to popular culture and TV than you can shake a stick at — if that's your idea of a good time. It's the story of Norbert and Jeannie and Pippi in the trailer park known as Armadillo Acres.

Here is the continued Disneyization of the theater, only marginally different from what you'll get in Orlando. Which reminds me, next season the Gainesville Community Playhouse will present Beauty and the Beast.

All of the singers wear microphones. In the theater, especially in a setting as intimate as the Hipp, there should be no need for amplification. But then, neither is there live music to accompany the performers. Mind you, the Disneyization of the theater is succeeding on Broadway too, where virtual orchestras now have a toehold. What is lost is a sense of spontaneity heretofore an essential virtue of live theater.

Lauren Caldwell directs boldly and stages the play as is her quirky wont, and that is what keeps it visually interesting, the angles she chooses, the way she plays the sides of the Hipp's thrust stage against each other

Kelly Atkins, as Norbert's love interest Pippi, has pipes, a sensual vulnerability, and gives a dazzling soft–porn performance, including pole–spinning, that is not only titillating butt exquisitely assilating too.

Catherine Fries Vaughn as Norbert's wife, Jeannie, who is agoraphobic, is genuinely funny, concluding with touching sincerity that her condition is a tragic consequence of wearing Indoor Shoes.

Mark Chambers, a son of the South, can do this feller Norbert in his sleep. He's akin to them boys on "King of the Hill," as you can tell by his delivery and demeanor. He knows that this feller drinks Busch beer, or as we call it round here: Public School Teacher brand beer. It's rewarding to see Chambers in a star turn as the romantic lead, so he can show his chops, and his voice, that monster baritone, makes a mockery of the amplification Disneyization apparently requires.

There's a feller in the back row with his ball cap on. It's 98 degrees outside and it ain't no suits nor evening dresses inside neither.

The lights go down and crickets chirp. Twilight settles on Mihai Ciupe's down–home porchified set. Lights up on a Greek chorus transmogrified into White Trash.

Of course many of us know that there's a reason why White Trash ain't funny, same as Rednecks or Crackers or Klansmen, having to do with Ignorance as a Weapon, but to go into that would require a mental effort that a diversion such as this must do without. Ergo, electric chair jokes are now permitted, without having to sully one's thoughts with the moral quandary of capital punishment. Black babies can pop out of nowhere and nobody's offended.

Well, not exactly nobody. "I like the music, but I do not like the language," said the gramma behind me at the intermission. So, this popular move in play selection is still not without its risks for the Hipp. You can't please everyone. But you can't fault the Hipp for trying either. These summer musicals bring folk to the theater who hardly ever go there.

"This is the first time I've gotten out of the house in months," said another nice lady, clearly delighted with her furlough, and unconsciously mirroring the inner life of one of the caricatures on stage.