Theater reviews: Arsenic and Roses and Seagulls

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Less, it turns out, is not always more. Audacity Lab and Wingspan’s two offerings at the Festival of Independent Theatres (playing at the Bath House Cultural Center in Dallas), both fairly simple in terms of set and staging, don’t merit much more than limp applause and a smattering of snickers.

Audacity’s Arsenic and Roses, directed by Jeff Hernandez, sees a man looking for love in all the wrong places. Its opening sequence falsely intimates that it will be dark and sinister, comically noir. Instead it turns into a neurotic version of The Breakfast Club. Teresa Valenza as Katherine, the waitress who’s long harbored a thing for her accidental customer, Charles, is like Molly Ringwald on speed. She still ends up seeming wooden. Jeff Swearingen, whose Hamlet at The Hub explored melancholy thoughtfully, seems mismatched with his down-and-out role as Charles. He can play the part, but the subject stunts his range.

Brad McEntire’s play hints at all the teenaged love-sicknesses we might still harbor, but its clichéd attempts at happy endings make it a pallid show. Better to have stuck with the arsenic than with the roses.

Wingspan’s show, Seagulls, manages to be even less engaging than Arsenic and Roses is. Caryl Churchill’s play, where a woman is going on tour to exhibit her teleportation of objects, barely has a crisis worth thinking about. Director Susan Sargeant sees an introspective performance from Emily Gray as Valery, the teleporter. But precisely what’s important about Valery’s gift is unclear. Andrews Cope, as Valery’s boppy and irksome admirer, upsets any equilibrium that Gray and Cindy Beall as Di, Valery’s agent, manage to eke out.

Magically moving things around in thin air—for Valery a sign of female liberation and now of her impotence—might be some commentary on womanhood, but I’d rather shoot down the Seagulls than see them soar.

Arsenic and Roses and Seagulls feel dull and plodding, the one hyperventilating about love to the point of asphyxiation and the other too metaphysical to gain any traction.