It’s like going through Neil LaBute’s waste basket, reading bits and pieces of material.
Some of them are on their way to the recycle bin. Others need tightening, re-writing. a small fix. Some of them are excellent. Others fall short. But LaBute is a fine enough writer –very skillful with the needle — that “Just Desserts,” a collection of his scraps and scenes, makes for a friendly, sometimes delightful evening of the theater. It opened over the weeked as a production of the St. Louis Actors Studio at the Gaslight Theater, to run through June 19.
The six pieces include two almost-one act plays, each with three actors, a pair of two-handers and two monologues. They were directed by Milt Zoth and Kevin Beyer, with an excellent conceit. The set, a slick design by Patrick Huber, was a bar, with some tables downstage and the bar upstage, with performers sitting here and there, some alone at the bar, a few couples here and there. In some episodes, the arrival of a couple signaled a new scene; in others, people arrived together or separately, then sat at a table. Rachel Fenton played a waitress who wandered here and there.
“The New Testament,” which opened the evening, was far and away the most enjoyable, with bursts of sardonic humor here and there. We were at a meeting of a playwright (Christopher Hickey), an actor (Alan David) and a producer (Robert A. Mitchell). David, an Asian, has been signed to portray Jesus in Hickey’s play and Hickey resists strongly. Mitchell is caught in the middle. The timing is impeccable and all three actors offer impressive performances.
“Writers lie in their scripts, actors lie when they speak, and producers lie to everyone, all the time,” storms Hickey, who also considers actors as furniture. It’s the highlight of the evening;
“The Furies” involves Jimmy (Chad Morris), his sister, Jamie (Alyssa Ward) and his girl friend, Paula (Emily Baker). Ward is amazing. Tall and slender, her face a combination of dark eyebrows and dark hollows, large, dark eyes, a long slender nose. She could be a face from Picasso’s Cubist period come to life. She doesn’t speak for most of the time, and when she does it sounds like a flock of crows. But she dominates, and she is very funny, isolating Paula and turning her against Jimmy. It’s a little long, and now and then it slips off the track into tedium, but mostly it’s superb.
The problem with two-person shows is that they have to move rapidly to keep the boredom away and “Helter Skelter,” with Baker and William Roth as a married couple on a Christmas shopping trip, falls short. It gets off to a rapid start, involves infidelity. but slides into banality. “Romance” is the other two-hander involving Hickey, Jackie Manker, Belinda Quimby and James Slover, with various gender combinations during the run. Hickey and Slover were on last night, in the throes of a breakup , and it was mostly successful.
The monologues are “I Love This Game,” with Roth in a Fleer’s Dubble Bubble cap relating a tale of attitudes toward baseball and Fenton, in “Bad Girl,” discussing her sexual likes and dislikes, and remembering a mistake she made by letting a one-night stand have an encore performance. Both are interesting, Roth’s more so, but I wonder if women talk the way Fenton does. After all, the playwright is a man.
An entertaining evening,flat in spots but with plenty of brittle, acerbic humor.
Just Desserts, short plays and sketches by Neil LaBute, is produced by the St. Louis Actors Studio at the Gaslight Theater through June 19
—Joe
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Joe, you do a great job reviewing the theater. I enjoy reading you.