By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on May 22, 2011, at 9:51 AM Updated on 5/22 at 9:51 AM
So I spent the night the world was supposed to end at the Nightingale Theater.
There was no philosophical or religious reason for doing so. For one thing, I am familiar with Matthew 24:35-36, which apparently the fellow in California who started this last round of apocalyptic chatter has never read in the course of his alleged 50 years of Bible reading.
But I digress.
No, my reason for being at the Nightingale was purely one of trying to do one of my jobs here at the Tulsa World. Prior commitments had kept me from attending the Midwestern Theatre Troupe’s production of University of Tulsa professor Michael Wright’s “Blood Relations” before Saturday, which happened to be the final show of the play’s two-weekend run.
Last days. Last show. It seemed to make sense. The theater even had a fetching young woman done up as a kind of Frederick’s of Hollywood version of the Devil helping to serve drinks at the Nightingale’s combination ticket counter-popcorn stand-bar, which also – on the particular evening – seemed to make some kind of sense.
And while I know that the Nightingale planned to present this play long before all this “Rapture” business began, it also made a weird kind of sense that, on this putative “night of the beginning of the end,” the company was putting on a show about the sins of the fathers being visited again and again upon the sons.
In “Blood Relations,” that sin is abandonment – something that Ray (Mark Miller), a blustery, fast-talking hustler who makes his living as a security guard, did about 18 years ago, when he took his infant son and left his wife in New York City, setting up a new home in a Baltimore suburb.
Ray left behind something else, it seems – which breaks into his home one evening and announces himself as Warren (Derek Ball), Ray’s second son. And this black-clad, sunglasses-at-night character with the odd splash of blood-red dye in his hair has come to exact some unspecified revenge from “Dah-dah.”
“Blood Relations” is something of a departure for the Midwestern Theater Troupe, in that it is a relentlessly old-fashioned naturalistic play. The set, credited in the program to “JEC Jr. and JEC III,” recreates in impressive detail the look of a 1980s tract home. There are no moments of intentional surrealism, no fourth wall being broken down. Envelopes in this show exist only to be opened and their contents examined by the characters, not pushed by the production itself.
In his program note, Wright said the four characters in the play have qualities of the “the four elements.” Ray, with his rapid-fire speech and equally swift changes of mood, is air, while the combustible Warren is fire.
Ray’s first son, Sonny (Robert Clinton McLellan), is as malleable as water, while Amy (Sara Cruncleton), Ray’s current paramour and Sonny’s former teacher, is – not surprisingly – earth.
Wright’s play has a lot to commend it. Although some scenes could have used a bit of trimming – where the same material gets hashed and rehashed a little too much – the structure is sound, and the way the story plays out is effective, coming to a pleasingly ironic and slightly ambiguous conclusion.
The problem, however, with this production is that these elemental characters never did mix well together.
Miller’s single-mindedly locomotive approach to Ray – a bullish self-centered guy bent on filling the air with talk – continually derails the emotional aspects of the character.
Part of that is due to the way the part is written – Ray’s instant suspicion is instantly supplanted by instant acceptance of Warren – but Miller did little to give the character any deeper emotional shading.
By comparison, Sara Cruncleton’s performance as Amy was the best of the evening, making the character’s desire to be a part some kind of family – even this one – palpable.
McLellan is good at getting the fecklessness of Sonny down pat – the character is a child who apparently can’t, and may never, grow up.
Ball’s Warren was a fire that rarely generated much heat, at least until the final scenes, when the family secrets and truths he’s come looking for get revealed. Despite brandishing switchblade and revolver and a wealth of sardonic asides that tend to sail over the other characters’ heads, this Warren never quite becomes the figure of menace and disruption it’s supposed to be.
But it’s all in the past now. The Nightingale Theater is moving on, making plans (according the program), for a new vaudeville-burlesque show called “School for Red Hot Mamas,” coming in June, and promising the debut of “The Blue Whale of Catoosa,” an “original rock ‘n’ roll sci-fi musical fantasy sent in the distant, post-human future, examining the origins of the Blue Whale of Catoosa and its role in the fate of humanity.”
Now THAT is going to be something to see.
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