Gaze around your dinner table. See the loving looks (more or less) of your family? Remember them at Mud and The Rope, two short plays that, though vastly dissimilar, put the diss in dysfunctional.
One, however, functions with more dramatic clarity and complexity. And it's not the one by the immortal Eugene O'Neill.
The Rope, one of O'Neill's earliest cloaked examinations of his own ruptured relationship with his father after returning from a sea voyage (artistically culminating in the iconic Long Day's Journey Into Night), is a one-act, 45-minute piece set at a barn atop a rocky shore cliff on the East Coast, circa 1912. A rope ending in a noose hangs ominously from its ceiling as miserly father Abraham (Irv Atkins) plots the demise of his returning sailor son, Luke (Scott Jenkins), by coaxing him to hang himself in search of the family fortune—gold that Abe stashed near the end of the noose.
It's a dark but intriguing premise, assuming painful family dynamics are clearly laid out. Yet in director Brian Kral's translation, the characters' interconnectedness with one another and the rest of Abraham's family—brutish son-in-law Pat (Timothy J. Burris), beaten-down daughter Annie (Karen Fedelleck) and young granddaughter Mary (Shannon Henley)—disconnects due to performances both under- and overwhelming. Jenkins leaves virtually no impression, verbally or visually, as the prodigal seaman. He barely projects and can scarcely be heard, even given the Little Theatre's cozy confines, and settles for lazy line recitation rather than a characterization. And Atkins' murder-minded daddy is a wan, enervated nonentity. Burris is neither laid-back nor timid, but blasts his thick Irish brogue so aggressively he sometimes reduces his part to unintelligible barking. Fedelleck and young Henley fare decently, but Kral also sabotages The Rope with blocking that has characters wandering and circling aimlessly about the stage for no discernible reason, other than to avoid looking like a play in lockdown.
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The "family" in 1983's Mud, by Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes, is a misfit trio forged out of need, circumstance and desperation. But it's not merely relationships, but social strife—and lifelong striving—Fornes has on her mind, making it the more multidimensional of the two.
In Las Vegas Little Theatre's Insomniac Project production, Katrina Larsen stars as poverty-stricken Mae, a self-described "empty soul" who's determined to educate herself—she's learning to read and do arithmetic—and attain some dignity amid the squalor of her small-town life in the 1930s. That's challenging, given the presence of Lloyd (Mark Brunton), a coarse, ball-scratching lout with whom Mae's been living since her father brought Lloyd home decades earlier as an act of kindness. They're not husband and wife, more of a de facto couple, but the hard-working Mae suffers this oaf and reluctantly takes care of him, given his obliviousness to his own well-being, never mind any urge to improve himself. "We're like animals that grew up together," she tells him.
Into this deadening cycle comes Henry (Joe Hammond, who also directed), a modestly educated townie with whom Mae becomes enamored, at least intellectually, and invites to live with them, much to Lloyd's muttering annoyance when he's replaced in Mae's bed. But when Henry is paralyzed in a fall, Lloyd takes sadistic glee in harshly "caring" for him, while Mae grows increasingly dejected. She swears she'll escape this hellhole existence. "I wanna die clean!" she wails. But it's like crawling through mud.
Fornes' nearly hour-long work is harsh, even ugly in its language and characterizations, appropriately so. It's about people trying—and not trying—to rise above the primordial ooze that still slathers segments of our so-called civilization, economically, culturally and spiritually. And it's brought to vivid life by a committed cast. Larsen, a reliable LVLT vet, poignantly captures Mae's earnest yearning for something, anything better than the life that chains her to such misery, but never lets us forget she's a product of her environment, a lower-rung creature on the human ladder. She can scream "F--k you!" to Lloyd while ironing trousers or yanking her hand away when he forces it on his groin, then haltingly read about the biology of a starfish or hermit crab from a basic-level schoolbook and tenderly accept a gift of lipstick from Henry as if it's refinement in a tube.
Brunton convincingly takes Lloyd to about two steps above an ape, stomping, sagging, snoozing and moaning from an illness he won't even go to a clinic to treat, curled up in a ball under the table. And Hammond has both comic and dramatic tour-de-force moments as he devolves from Mae's kindly teacher to debilitated housemate to soul-sucking leech.
In Mud, the playwright has something to say. This cast knows how to say it.