THEATER: Hold Me, Brill Me

New playwright mines old territory—but cleverly—in satiric Harlequin Brill

Steve Bornfeld

Fresh meat on the grill—mmmmm.


Yummy-yummy-yummy to my theatrical tummy?


Indelicate, perhaps, but when the aroma of new food for critical thought wafts through town, especially with the tang and texture of Harlequin Brill, well, fire up the ol' George Foreman.


Grad-student playwright Cody Tucker brings a crisp imagination to the stage—even if his clever script lacks subtlety and re-canvasses that stale same-old of media/celeb satire and corporate disposability—in Nevada Conservatory Theatre's kickoff to its Adventure Series season.


Tucker is a promising talent—entertaining, invigorating and thoughtful—worth our attention, and future work promises more depth than he reveals here. He's a showman.


Harlequin Brill wraps dreamlike and realistic elements into an impressionistic fugue of a play about an aspiring cheapie-novel hack for publishing pooh-bah Harlequin Brill, a veritable fiction factory of romance, fantasy and adventure for the bargain-bin set.


Geoffrey Habland (Jason Lockhart) is plucked out of the basement writers' cave by the boss, book bigwig J.R. Barnhart (Federico Flores Jr.), and selected as Harlequin's new star scribe. Before he's penned any pages, he's renamed Thomas Mantle (the nom de plume "just JUMPS off the cover"), given an image overhaul from word geek to club god, and set on a glittering (and decadent) public course of, yes, romance, fantasy and adventure—with hookers, orgies and drugs—to pump up the public appetite for a product yet to exist.


Check that. The product exists. It's the writer; not his writings. A whole lotta media-manipulated noise over a whole lotta nuttin'. ... The celebrity cart pulling the celebrity horse ... See "Paris Hilton; justification of existence."


It's yet another broadside at a fat target, lobbing obvious satirical grenades—it's getting tougher to parody an increasingly self-parodying media—but the fun to be had in Harlequin Brill is in the details of the assault.


Utilizing a thrust stage (audience on three sides), director Jerry L. Crawford mega-stylizes this production: Characters pose in freeze-frame in the shadowy background as action commences in the foreground; the movements of Brill employees are discreetly roboticized to underscore their drone-like existence, a device alternately effective and annoying; and Crawford's stage blocking occasionally has characters gazing and talking toward some unseen entity, directly addressing neither the audience nor each other, as if attempting to make Tucker's themes seem universal and profound, rather than parochial and overly familiar.


But Tucker's script sparkles with naturalistic, easy-flow dialogue and behavior (pettiness, narcissism, envy, pretentiousness) that rings true, punctuated by pithy theatrical flourishes. An elevator ride from the writers' basement to the boss' penthouse becomes a wickedly funny lampoon of corporate preening, and the P.A./books-on-tape-style narration, with scenes advancing as chapters, is a brisk, lively device. Plus, orgy scenes (the standard lifestyle of all us wordsmiths) are sensuously staged. Tucker knows his debauchery.


Though his critique of media/corporate insanity is more surface than substance, the playwright has a knack for the line that kills, nailing mass disappointment when a writer observes: "Few people live their own dreams. They live inside somebody else's. Case in point—us."


A sturdy cast with bench strength really delivers, from Lockhart as the writer on a loony roller-coaster ride, to Regan Cooley as his coldly realistic spouse, to Flores as the slickster boss who constructs the Almighty Image using truth and lies as interchangeable parts. (The climactic marketing of Thomas Mantle, though saying nothing new about Madison Avenue phoniness, is a zippy journey into absurdity.)


Scenic designer Rebecca Lee's use of risers and slide-show murals proves both efficient and visually interesting, and lighting designer Hannah Boigon blends shadows and deep reds for an effectively sinister glow.


If Cody Tucker's quirky piece of stagecraft isn't filling, it sure is tasty.


Throw another play on the barbie, Cody. And soon.

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