STAGE REVIEWS: PADUA HILLS : A Successful ‘Promotion’

After the first and least interesting piece at the opening night performance of the B Series at Padua Hills, actress O-Lan Jones--our guide for the evening--attempted to take the audience on a quick route to the second site. But then a young man with a flashlight redirected the group circuitously around the building, the long way.

The opening play, Kelly Stuart’s “The Interpreter of Horror,” had the same effect. The playwright takes the long way around to reach a destination that would be more effective by a shorter route. Horror, a waitress in a cheesy coffee shop, is harassed by a flagrantly campy manager and threatened by a new waitress.

The waitresses (respectively, Pamela Gordon and Megan Butler) are also harassed by customers, but not enough to hamper their fascination with male chauvinism, child molestation and abuse of women. The customers have their own agendas in the same areas.

The co-direction of James Oseland and the playwright tries to make the trip interesting by treating the play as a cartoon and deploying the actors as cartoon characters. The experiment fizzles in its ultimate lack of purpose.

The other two plays hit harder and leave a lingering sense of discovery, in spite of the fact that they are, with apologies to the playwrights, that bete noir of the avant garde, “well-made plays.” After all, well-made plays are only plays that work, and both Murray Mednick’s “Heads” and John O’Keefe’s “The Promotion” work like gangbusters.

Mednick’s visceral, insightful inspection of Flower Children, a decade and a half after the bouquet has dried up and turned to dust, raises disturbing questions in the mind of those who lived through that rose-colored age. Where have all those children gone? In Mednick’s vision they have mutated into bitterly laughable--and pitiable--ogres, whether still living as drop-outs near Woodstock or in alcoholic seclusion in a Silver Lake shack.

When Woodstock Tom runs into Silver Lake Peter in a supermarket, he drags him back to his run-down farmhouse to hash over old times with Ella Mae, and to see how the kids have grown. Peter realizes his mistake in accepting the invitation when Tom locks the door and they begin to strip away the fairy tale patina of the past. Under Steve Albrezzi’s relentless direction, William Dennis Hunt as Tom and Norbert Weisser as Peter give stunning performances, fueled by their characters’ anger and desperation. Nancy Mette, looking somewhat too young as Ella Mae, has moments of vibrant pathos as a woman who has never grown up, but much of her performance is lost due to her inaudibility. Karole Foreman and Gina LaMond are effective as the illiterate daughters, the unfortunate issue of a demented dream.

If “Heads” has a problem, and it does, it’s in an ending that is melodramatic and overly theatrical, but not part of the strong drama which builds up to it.

John O’Keefe’s “The Promotion” has no problems. It is a brilliant piece of writing that roars like thunder through the mind, accompanied by flashes of lightning in Scott Paulin’s kinetic and masterful performance. He plays several characters, caught up in the maelstrom of the playwright’s verbal invention and his view of the many shades of reality.

Tom is anxiously angling for a promotion to vice president as he leaves his office with a superior, Darrell. Tom is concerned about the impression he makes, and daunted by Darrell’s new camaraderie. Then the unbelievable (to Tom) happens. He realizes he’s left the key to his cherished BMW in his desk. How can he pass the security guard again after he’s said good-night? There’s no getting out of it, he has to go back.

O’Keefe, who also directs, then takes Tom, a John Cheever anti-hero, into a nightmare world of chaos and devastation, an Armageddon of the soul. It might be the Kafkaesque disintegration of Tom’s paranoid existence in the modern world--or it might all be true. Tom never knows, even as he plunges toward oblivion in what’s left of the elevator shaft. His promotion, whatever its reality and destination, is frightening and glorious and often very funny.