Friday, June 5, 2009

Theater reviews: Greater Tuna, Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes, and Vincent River

By Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

DRAGGIN’ FLIES: Chris Robinson, left, and Ryan Roach step into the heels of Jaston Williams and Joe Sears.

Greater Tuna has been around so long — and has been so closely identified with its authors and most frequent performers, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams — that trying to stage a local production, as Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre has done, is fraught with dangers. Do you mimic the originals, whose vocal tics and stylistic flourishes have become ingrained in the theatergoing psyche, or throw it all out and march to your own drummer? FMPAT does a bit of both.

The resulting pastiche of gags and line readings culled from the new actors’ own reservoir and the creators’ minds works surprisingly well — sometimes better, sometimes not, but always riotously.

Chris Robinson and Ryan Roach have big shoes to fill — even if those shoes are occasionally bunny slippers and stiletto heels. Just two actors portray nearly two dozen residents of Tuna, Texas, a town where the farm report is still big news and book burnings are as common as church socials. This droll, twangy satire of Lone Star quirkiness has been around 25 years and remains as fresh and withering as ever.

In some ways more so. Roach and Robinson bring a newness to the pacing, a more rapid-fire way of delivering lines (which makes up slightly for some slow costume changes) that gives the show bounce — this is Texas swing, not the do-si-do.

Roach sidles most comfortably into his roles, especially the show’s de facto protagonist, put-upon hausfrau Bertha Bumiller. Robinson makes riskier choices, some of which pay off (his swishy journalist Chad Hartford bests Williams’ original), some not (how can he not croak out Didi Snavely’s Marlboro-scarred lines?). But this scaled-down staging earns every cascading laugh it gets.

Matt Mrozek

Cast of Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes

The satire of Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes is certainly edgier than Greater Tuna, but no less effective just because it’s set in Hollywood rather than East Texas. Like Speed-the-Plow and Hurlyburly — and to some degree, even the HBO series Entourage — Jihad Jones doles out its indictment of Tinseltown in sick, bitter morsels for you to choke on slowly.

Ashraf (Ethan Rains) is a gifted but unknown actor of Persian decent, offered a key role in a major film to be directed by Julius Steele (Christopher Carlos), a fantasy amalgam of Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino. The only problem? It’s a baroquely over-written stereotype of Muslim fanaticism, the kind of part that would cause his mother to spit on him.

Or is it? Ashraf’s agent Barry (Michael Federico), who looks to be one salty snack shy of throwing a brain embolism, sees it as a comedy … and a money machine for his broke client.

Kitchen Dog Theater’s production of Yussef El Guindi’s play is scathing without being angry, hilarious but occasionally profound. Its biggest flaw it that it overplays its hand sometimes (Julius in particular seems almost defiantly dense). But Federico’s boiling crock-pot of a powerbroker serves as a perpetual motion machine of outrageous jokes, and Rains is both gifted and smokin’ hot (he spends a lot of the play in his underwear — all the better). What “Jihad Jones” lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for in ballsiness.

While Uptown Players is busy staging its bonus show Mommie Queerest inside the Rose Room, its usual venue, the KD Studio Theatre, is being put to good (and gay) use by Theatre Britain.

Vincent River is a taut two-character drama where the adage “more than meets the eye” is itself an understatement. A woman (Sue Roberts-Birch) living in a dank London flat spots a young man (James Chandler) lurking outside and coaxes him in. She’s become numb to the attention ever since the media have turned the murder of her son in a public bathroom into a devastating ordeal. But the young man seems to be something other a news hound, and the odd relationship that develops between them leads inexorably to a devastating reminiscence on a gay-bashing and the toll it takes on two strangers.

Philip Ridley’s hour-long one-act has its share of dramatic surprises, but none more effective than the performances of Roberts-Birch and Chandler. Roberts-Birch’s aching mother is prickly and hard, but also tender and vulnerable. Chandler’s itchy, restless performance (with a spot-on accent) bristles with intensity.

They’ve taken cues from director Robin Armstrong’s staging, which echoes the kitchen-sink dramas of British theater and cinema of the 1960s: Bleak, perhaps, but with realism so tactile as to make you feel emotionally alive.

Theatre Britain debuted this production earlier this year at the Out of the Loop Festival where it played for only four performances. This revival, in conjunction with Uptown Players, gives a whole new audience the chance to marvel in this wonderful piece, as timely as it is heartbreaking.

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