Monday, June 13, 2016

QUICK TAKE REVIEW By Beverly Creasey Tragi-Comic Déjà Vu



Patrick Gabridge’s political send-up, BLINDERS (@ Flat Earth Theatre through June 25th) features an outsider candidate for President (a scientific twinship, actually) who appeals to the lowest common denominator, promising to eradicate poverty by imprisoning poor people and to silence dissenters by walling them up. Believe it or not, BLINDERS was written when Bill, not Hillary, was running for President, at a time when Gabridge thought such comic ideas were too outlandish ever to come true. Let that be a lesson to all.

Director Korinne T. Ritchey’s intense, well oiled production for Flat Earth features nine on-the-money actors, led by Kimberly McClure as the one courageous woman in America who won’t be sold a bill of goods. As good as McClure is, the most fun in BLINDERS comes from the double, triple and quadruple casting, with hilarious performances from Glen Moore as a mad scientist, a dimwitted mailman, a nasty policeman and a conniving Southern Senator (Is there any other kind?) and from Marge Dunn as an airheaded shopaholic, a crazy psych patient, an ecstatic whiner and an operative named Fat Dominic.

Alas, the law of unintended consequences after the massacre in Orlando early this morning kept me from finding gunshots (intended as outrageous satire) amusing.

There is no satire in gunfire anymore. As one of the survivors sadly said, “There is no going back.”