Going to see "The Dispute" is an experience in itself before the audience takes their seats. It's the initial production from a new theatre collective called YoungLiars, pretty much pure experimental theatre. The piece, adapted by the group's producing directors Maggie Conroy and Chuck Harper, began with what the program describes as "a semi-literal Google translation" of the original 18th Century play by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux. There's dialogue added from other writers up until the 1930's.
But the arrival is where we should begin. When you step off the elevator at the Centene Center's fourth floor, you're greeted by a cast member who offers to take your coat. You're directed into a large room with a couple of round tables with candles, and in its center a man in a peruke and elegant French court dress. He's surrounded by sound equipment and bends over a desk. Rather loud modern music plays, but the man is muttering in French, a few words becoming audible now and then. It's rather Dali-esque. No chairs. Other people in costume come and go. A piano is moved across the room. Another seeming cast member circulates, offering water or wine. Curtain time comes very near, and people surely are contemplating the wisdom of spending an entire play standing up. But then cast members begin carrying in chairs and arranging them in a large semicircle. Ah.
The chap in the peruke is Monsieur, Jeff Skoblow, an author who's been talking to himself because his muse has abandoned him and he's having trouble writing. (Take a number, buddy….) Who, he ponders, are the most inconstant, men or women? He proposes a fanciful and of course totally impossible scenario that gives us the main story line of the evening, and we seg into it. Conroy and Marcy Wiegert are two air-headed beauties fawned over by equally intellectual young men, Mitch Eagles and Paul Cereghino. The roles are stereotypes demanded by the script, so there's a lot of posing and vogueing, but it's great fun, and some of the lines are pretty funny, too. These four charmers are the responsibility of Julie Layton and Ben Watts, who never lose their cool with the young ones but who do vamp into a killer rendition of "Games That Lovers Play". It's good enough that it could go on the road as a cabaret act.
The ensemble is completed by Anna Skidis Vargas and Jonah Walker, perhaps a pair of scientists (at any rate, they're wearing lab coats), whose roles switch from wildly physical comedy and a lot of it to stock-still straight-faced recital of rules. These may be the funniest bits of the whole night, and far more elaborate than they seem at first.
Chuck Harper directed the show, and the delicious costumes were designed by Conroy. Marcy Wiegert is credited as couteriere extraordinaire, so she deserves some of the credit for that eye candy.
New stuff, pretty interesting and considerably more fun than one might have expected.
The Dispute
through February 26
YoungLiars
Centene Center for Arts and Education
3547 Olive
253-682-8258