Theater reviews: Under a Texaco Canopy and Overtones

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Were it not for its some time tedious and self-indulgent soliloquizing, Ellsworth Schave’s Under a Texaco Canopy (playing at the Bath House Cultural Center as part of the Festival of Independent Theatres) would hit the mark. A blend of country humor, otherworldly influences, and romantic interludes, the work ends up balancing out pretty evenly thanks to its direction under One-Thirty Productions’ Larry Randolph.

Shane Beeson’s Man, a stranger who shows up unannounced at a Texaco station to disrupt and transform the daily lives of Frank, Slim, and Waitress, is a bit schizophrenic. Sometimes giving philosophical pronouncements and other times making mordant remarks, his Man seesaws between being a sap or a cynic. But Man necessitates manic urgency in his crossovers between life and death, and on that note, Beeson hits the right tone.

Slim (Stan Graner) and Frank (Donny Avery) play off each other in an Andy Griffith/Don Knotts kind of way, allowing quietly expectant moments to interrupt their banter. Morgan Justiss as Waitress gives her brief, introspective role life and credibility. But I’m unsure why she and Man hit it off so quickly and why talk of death is such an aphrodisiac.

The play’s ending is just right, bringing everything back to a humorous buoyancy that could have sustained the play alone. Yet while Under a Texaco Canopy’s occasional forays into weirdly pseudo-mysterious moments minorly subtract from its fun, witty, and well-played whole, it’s worth filling up at this station.

Echo Theatre’s Brandi Andrade directs Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones (also playing at the Bath House Cultural Center as part of FIT), which focuses on a division between soul and self. After many years, a socialite and a starved artist’s wife reconnect. Harriet, the rich one, jilted her former beau, now Margaret’s husband, because she’d thought he’d stay a pauper. Turns out he made it big. Now she wants her portrait done by him, and she’ll use Margaret’s sympathies for him as bait.

Gerstenberg’s 1915 script responds to psycho-therapy, seeing Harriet and Margaret suavely and adeptly barter and trade in pleasantries that mask their intent. Like Edith Wharton’s painfully constricted social milieus in turn-of-the-century America, Leslie Patrick’s Harriet and Tracie Foster’s Margaret chip away at each other’s surface equilibrium as they pass the tea and cakes. It’s a beautiful dance of stealth done in complete froideur.

Meanwhile, Hetty and Maggie, the subconsciouses, loudly harangue each other. Ginger Goldman’s Hetty takes to her role like Veruca Salt in search of restitution, her petulant and strident temper tantrums only mildly upsetting Harriet’s composure. Lauren Paige Patterson (Maggie), less aggressive in her outbursts, advises Margaret with more cunning and less brashness.

While quick, pithy, and engaging, Overtones might be a little too obvious in its Freudian riff. Nevertheless, in an age of cognitive behaviorial therapy, the facile binaries of conscious and subconscious have the same appeal as flapper dresses and reticules, stylish in their vintageness.