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National lampoon
2nd Story’s mad, mad Vacation
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Christopher Durang — he of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You fame — has always found reality too difficult to look at unparodied. Trouble is, his patented brand of broad, college humor has sometimes reached for trenchant significance but come up with Saturday Night Live.

But between the playwright’s nearly quarter-century of practice and 2nd Story Theatre’s deft delivery, Betty’s Summer Vacation is quite an accomplishment. It’s his latest whup upside the head of America’s collective neurotic culture, first staged in 1999. Theatergoers who have smiled but rolled their eyes over some of Durang’s previous plays now might very well snap their fingers and go, "A-ha! That’s what he’s been trying for."

Looking for a peaceful summer at a rental cottage by the sea, Betty (Maureen Bennett) finds herself confronting a menagerie of four loony housemates: A babbler in a tennis skirt, a horny airhead surfer, a nervous quiet guy who may be a serial killer, and an older woman who likes to invite derelicts in for sex. Where is Jerry Springer’s booker when you need her?

It’s a recipe for hilarious interplay, while Betty reacts slack-jawed, like that baffled old man in The Pink Panther who takes his chair to the middle of a quiet town square to watch the car chase swirl around him. She is our stand-in, stunned and shocked before the madness in the world.

The 2nd Story troupe is terrific at both the play’s shenanigans and the dimensionality that these potentially cartoonish characters need. Melissa Penick gives great garrulousness as Trudy, refusing to make her a fool as the young woman uses friendliness as a shield to fend off the dangerous reality of people. Trudy is curious enough to check out the album of penis pix that Buck wants to show off. For his part, Sean McConaghy wisely does make him a childish fool instead of a canny one, stupid rather than malicious. "Do you like flavored condoms?" he asks Betty upon meeting her.

The owner of the cottage, Mrs. Seizmagraff, has to move in with the others because, as she chipperly relates, her husband has just died and she has no other place to live. In lime-green slacks, Barbara S. McElroy plays her like a one-woman band, as the playwright makes fun of our automatically accepting such life-grabbing female Zorbas. Mark McLure gives his well-practiced nervous odd-fellow portrayal (hey — let the guy do Hamlet once in a while). His Keith enters with hat boxes he insists contain no heads, and McClure’s well-timed eye aversion subtly steals scenes. The last character, the derelict flasher Mr. Vanislaw, is given eager bawdiness by Vince Pentronio.

Under director Ed Shea’s sure hand, the actors fine-tune their performances skillfully. None more so than Bennett’s Betty, who walks a fine line between Olive Oyl fright poses and realistic responses. A comical Macaulay Culkin scream face morphs into Edvard Munch’s "The Cry."

Durang has always tried to trick us into complicity with people and attitudes we scorn, simply by getting us to laugh before we think. The thing is, that doesn’t make us realize we’re capable of cruelty and insensitivity, only that that we’re wired to laugh more readily than to cogitate. (Honestly, Christopher, when a man slips on a banana peel, do you think concussion?)

In Betty’s Summer Vacation, Durang finally found a more theatrically effective device than to set us up and go "gotcha." As Bertolt Brecht discovered and practiced, keeping us aware that we are watching a play, not getting us to lose ourselves in a dream world, leaves our critical faculties intact. We remain rational observers, not dupes.

Durang does this by providing an outlandish Greek chorus. At first they are a laugh track that startles the characters; then they are voices from the ceiling, sometimes perfunctorily apologizing for why they’re laughing, such as for sexual titillation. They grow increasingly talkative, insistent, then ominous. "Entertain us!," they shriek. Perform a Court TV murder trial or else, they demand of the characters, two of whom at that point are dripping with blood. Eventually they physically enter the world of these horrific misfits, as Jim Sullivan, Gayle Hanrahan, and Wayne Kneeland slouch and laugh and menace, snarls just a disappointment away.

They are the increasingly jaded reality TV audience around us, and we are allowed — instead of tricked — to join them as they guffaw at horrendous occurrences. With no moral center, this nation forgives any barbarity amiably apologized for. Mrs. Seizmagraff is given the core observation of the play. There was a time, she relates, when hazed sorority pledges were shown writhing worms, then were blindfolded and made to eat cold spaghetti. Such a difference nowadays, she says, when their tormentors don’t have the decency to replace the worms.

Wonderful play, marvelously executed.

Know, though, that this may very well be a minority report. My two companions were not won over. One found Durang’s style too heavy-handed and the other observed that "reality sucks enough as it is." So be prepared. The smarty-pants playwright may have come a long way but, like the matters he rails at through a clenched grin, he can be hard to take.


Issue Date: May 2 - 8, 2003
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