STAGE: Fourplay

Voices tell you to get Back Before Midnight so you don’t wind up an Insomniac. … Oh, and Take Off Your Clothes

Steve Bornfeld

Take off your clothes first. Bad news sounds better a la buff. (If you're merely passing this page on the way to the sex ads ... eyes front, perv.)


I'd like to call this quartet of quixotic presentations theatrical fourplay—let us nibble at your footlights and nosh on your props!—but with a lone exception, they're flaccid attempts at artistic arousal. A liter of Levitra and a stash of Cialis couldn't cure this much presentile dysfunction.



• • •


Empress Theatre's Take Off Your Clothes, I'll Make You a Star banners the most titillation and delivers the most flat-chested, flatfooted and just plain flat fiasco of the foursome. Say something nice? Nice of them not to pick a bigger playhouse that holds more paying customers. Playwright-director-star Joseph Bernard's headache in two acts (a four-Excedrin migraine) was inflicted on Vegas twice in the '80s, and this third assault is cruel to all concerned—audience and actors.


Desperate to be a madcap, screwball comedy through which all manner of madcap screwballs pass, Bernard's aimless pastiche casts himself as Ben Bleiberg, a cranky old owner of a bedraggled, Hollywood acting academy. In a plotless string of charmless sketches stretched—like a torture victim on the rack—over two hours, nearly 30 hammy-whiny wannabe actors parade by to wheedle Ben into lessons. With that many characters crammed in, only Bernard's Ben emerges as nominally more than a stick figure, one stuck with warmed-over Yiddishisms, oy-vey-is-me self-pity and the stooped-over gait of a shuffling schlemazel.


Under-directed (no vision, performers look abandoned), overacted and overcrowded, Clothes executes breathtaking belly flops: an offensive Arab stereotype, particularly unsettling in today's world; sloppy hodgepodge of old and new Hollywood references (actors refer to being in the early-'70s series The Rookies and want to be the next George Clooney); Act II awkwardly picks up in the middle of the scene that ended Act I; lead character Ben vanishes for much of Act II, ceding it to a slickster producer portrayed by Carl Butto, his performance a series of posed, swaggering snapshots; a "movie star" scarily resembles Madame Tussaud's wax Wayne Newton.


A five-star calamity with a no-star rating. But cut the actors—a few (C.J. Maldonado, Susan Lowe) rising above the radioactivity—a break. Maybe they didn't peruse the script before committing. That's called plausible deniability.



0 stars, through September 25, Highland Playhouse, 334-3653.



• • •


At Las Vegas Little Theatre (mounting three productions simultaneously), a staged reading of A.R. Gurney's well-meaning but wearying Ancestral Voices christens the new Fischer Black Box Theatre, a complement to the main stage (hosting Beau Jest at 8 p.m., the Insomniac Project at 11). This is a sweet, but slow and static presentation; at times I was more riveted to the sound of my watch ticking.


Actors on stools recite Gurney's tale of a well-off Buffalo family, their relationships unfolding against the ominous backdrop of Hitler's rise. Told from the perspective of young son Eddie (voiced too preciously by Jerome Vital), it's a warm story about how the family unit—confusing, contradictory, even nonsensical as it can be—is still the best buoy to cling to when the world's storms strike.


Gloria Hoffman and Jack Winston, both in duel roles as divorced grandparents and their new, less-than-satisfying partners, keenly mine the subtleties of their characters, transcending the restrictions of the form. But in its contemplative quietude over 90 intermission-less minutes, Ancestral Voices is too hushed to make its message heard. ... Tick-tock ... tick-tock ....



(1 star), through September 25, Las Vegas Little Theatre, 362-7996.



• • •


What kind of chasm separates a well-written thriller from mere stage filler? Don't look down, because Theatre in the Valley's I'll Be Back Before Midnight jumps that Rubicon, turning playwright Peter Colley's well-crafted chills into little more than an acting drill.


The plot has Greg (Michael Drake) renting a remote farmhouse in which his wife, Jan (Jennifer K. Stuber) can recover from a recent breakdown. But when Greg's snide, taunting sister Laura (Colleen Lohide) arrives, and farmhouse owner George (Charles Addison) tells ghostly tales of a long-ago murder victim who stalks the joint, Jan teeters on the brink of Breakdown, The Sequel. Is she taking that leap herself, or getting a helpful shove?


Exploiting the link between humor and terror, Colley's created a darkly comic corkscrew of a play with twisty, tantalizing plot swerves. But the jolts never jell in this low-hum production that needed a kick in the can from director Rick Bindhamer.


On a wrinkled, dishrag-gray set—more rustic tenement than farmhouse—Stuber is initially effective as a jumpy tangle of frayed nerves, but the performance is eventually exposed as a one-note exercise, leaving the character nowhere to go when the story arc demands steadily heightened hysteria. Drake nicely essays the exasperated spouse, but doesn't suggest the complex crosscurrents Colley's written for him. In support, Lohide scores as a creepy manipulatrix, and Addison's staccato speech and evil, yet cheery giggle are intriguing little trimmings.


But while the looming-shadow lighting enhances the atmosphere, cheesy special effects and clumsily staged frights—tackier than they are terrifying—detract, sending Midnight to bed far too early.



(1 star), through October 1, Theatre in the Valley, 558-7275.



• • •


Three down and the one to go at least goes down better at this largely tasteless smorgasbord on the boards.


Though hardly cost-effective (10 smackers for 45 minutes) and far from the rugged drama on which this program once relied (Bash, The Blue Room, Mud), LVLT's Insomniac Project: Late-Night Confessions at least throws us a party, handing out smiles, giggles and laughs like they were streamers, noisemakers and silly hats. A collection of short-shorts directed by Robert Cox and John Randall, they fly by with good-natured outrageousness, the best penned by irreverent stylist Jeff Goode:


John Wennstrom plays an aging, overweight Spider-Man looking back nostalgically, and vaguely dismayed at the state of contemporary superheroes; Eat Your Cheerios, Jesus goes anti-biblical with an exasperated, Hispanic Virgin Mary in a housecoat (Angie Morales) scolding the Savior (Ryan Juncker), then kvetching, "I said to stay away from that Judas boy, he's no good. Does he listen?"; and in the vaudevillian, swords-and-skin finale, a goof on Cinderella, fetching and funny Lori Kay plays the sister in servitude whose fantasy studs (pick sides: the pirate? the prince?) arrive on her doorstep—shirtless, flexing wildly, sabers up—to do comic battle over her.


At least it's a carrot stick to munch on when a theatergoers' banquet goes bust.



(3 stars), through September 25, LVLT.

  • Get More Stories from Thu, Sep 22, 2005
Top of Story