Sleeping Weazel Productions has turned its attention to THE
BIRDS AND THE BEES for a festival of three new plays through June 11th.
The first, by Kate Snodgrass, is THE LAST BARK, directed by Melia Bensussen.
What better muse is there, I ask you, than Steven Barkhimer?
Not so long ago, the entire theater community was shocked to
learn of his emergency heart surgery, and was much relieved to have him back.
Playwright Kate Snodgrass was prompted to write and perform in a play starring
Barkhimer, based on his brush with mortality.
Now she’s written another about mortality, but this time it’s
all of us who will perish, in three days when a comet mows us down. Snodgrass
plays a therapist. Barkhimer plays an insecure actor (Is there any other kind?)
riddled with doubts about his artistic contributions to the world. She
reassures him, he knocks off a little Falstaff (!) and they face the unknown
together. It’s a sweet and funny valentine to one of the most prolific and
talented artists in Boston.
The two remaining plays in the evening are absurdist
exercises. The more cogent of the two is Charlotte Meehan’s BEESUS &
BALLUSTRADA in which two unlikely creatures, caretakers of squirrels and birds
— and evidently the last humans left on earth (or maybe the first two), become
a wild and wooly Adam and Eve: Humiliation, violence and thunderstorms are
foreplay for these two.
Cliff Odle as a
posturing, grass covered Beesus isn’t so sure he wants to join up with Karen MacDonald’s
bizarre Ballustrada because, as he knows full well, “people are trouble.”
Ballustrada gives him ample reason to hesitate: One minute she’s a flirty
coquette and the next she’s a harridan. Their antics are a bit repetitive (especially
the mixed media portion) but Meehan is fortunate to have director Melia
Bensussen and two superb actors to turn “a mild entertainment” into illuminating
flesh and blood.
Adara Meyers’ BIRDS, alas, is a jumble of images which elude
perception. When Vaclav Havel embraced theater of the absurd to indict
totalitarianism, the penalty was prison. When Beckett uses absurd imagery, the
dread is palpable. There isn’t anything at stake in Meyers’ strange send-up of
an “American Institute for Stress” — if that’s indeed her target. If it were a
stand-in for Scientology or the government, I could make a connection. I didn’t
see any.
BIRDS starts off with promise with a young birder, a
“citizen-scientist,” (an intense Alexander Rankine) tracking the sudden demise
of pigeons in the park. We see countless dead birds overhead, hanging upside
down, in mid-flight extinction. OK, I thought, Meyers’ play is about the
deleterious effects of pesticides or global warming. (By the by, where were the
bee trackers since BEES are in the title of the festival for heavens sake!) But
no, the bird counting is quickly abandoned and we follow Rankine and his
girlfriend (a quirky Julia Alvarez) to the Institute for Stress where violence
is the main course of study.
Cruelty at the institute is taught to perfection by Professor
Steven Barkhimer. Student automatons tie themselves up with scotch tape (not
red tape?) and regurgitate the party line. To what end? I haven’t a clue. This
entry eluded me entirely — and I like theater of the absurd.
