Boston's Alternative Source!
 
Feedback

[Theater reviews]

Where’s Kuntz?
A flawed Emerald City

BY ROBERT DAVID SULLIVAN

EMERALD CITY
By John Kuntz. Directed by Eric C. Engel. Set design by Tony Siracusa. Lighting by Deb Sullivan. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound by J. Hagenbuckle. Choreography by Rick Park. With Barlow Adamson, Rick Park, Julie Perkins, and Christopher Thorn. Presented by Centastage at the Boston Center for the Arts, Wednesday through Sunday through April 14.

Apart from the fact that the playwright does not appear in it, Emerald City is not a great departure from John Kuntz’s one-man shows. There is some dialogue, but the play’s four characters seem to be marking time until the second act, when each gets to speak directly to the audience. Like so many of Kuntz’s creations in such solo works as Freaks, all the characters here are delusional (afraid of flying monkeys, for example) and scarred by violence. Emerald City includes tales of bizarre deaths and bathroom-related humiliations, along with a “first time” story about gay sex. As in Kuntz’s more potent recent works (notably Sing Me to Sleep), there are jarring shifts in tone. In one monologue, Kuntz uses a comic-strip cliché — a frying pan to the head — to get a laugh, then expands on the image to make us squirm.

Emerald City also includes a lot of pop-culture references, not only the obvious ones to The Wizard of Oz but also those keyed to lowbrow TV programs and commercials. These digressions have been fun in Kuntz’s lighter shows, but this time they betray a lack of imagination. One character’s description of a Love Boat episode may add a touch of verisimilitude to his story of a fateful night many years ago, but realism isn’t really the point of a Kuntz play. In Emerald City, Kuntz goes pretty far, but he doesn’t have the nerve to go far enough toward creating a world that’s a funhouse reflection of our own. Too many things won’t make sense to any audience member lucky enough not to recognize the Love Boat theme.

The play opens at a Boston bar, where four oddballs assemble to trade life histories. The counterpart to Oz’s Dorothy is a perky Kansan in her mid 30s named Midge (Julie Perkins), who explains that her glittery red shoes came from a dumpster outside a drag bar. Having fled the dusty plains of her native state, she now works at a doughnut shop (“I watch a lot of zeroes frying all day”). When faced with anything unpleasant, she turns into a zombie and thinks about rainbows.

Kuntz’s stand-in for the brainless Scarecrow is a hustler named Kevin (Christopher Thorn), who wears bubble wrap under his shirt to keep warm and suffers from both epilepsy and Tourette syndrome. Kevin’s involuntary outbursts of obscenities are cleaned up, as it were, to include only scatological utterances, not the racist and homophobic language that plagues many with this condition. The use of Tourette syndrome feels like a cheap trick here, as it has just about every time I’ve seen it mined on stage or on TV, and it reinforces the notion that Kuntz is incapable of writing for characters with normal conversational skills. Fortunately, Kevin’s tics disappear during his monologue, in which he talks about his abusive father and about the incident in a cornfield that caused his current state of confusion.

The Tin Man is represented by Victor (Barlow Adamson), who wears a metal-gray suit and has a claw in place of his left hand. He once starred as a child-sized robot in a TV sit-com, and his agent mother (amusingly voiced by Perkins) could mop the floor with Gypsy’s Mama Rose. Victor, no surprise, has a hard time with the concept of love.

In the wobbliest parallel, Oz’s Cowardly Lion is turned into a beefy guy, supposedly a transvestite, named Ed (Rick Park) who wears a leopard-skin coat snatched from the same dumpster that yielded Midge her shoes. Ed is in love with Midge, but his violent temper — traceable to childhood fears — isn’t very attractive.

What happens when these four get together? Each tries to come up with the most horrifying memory and the cleverest allusion to The Wizard of Oz. Victor, for example, recalls that his first acting gig was in a TV commercial where a detergent changed clothes “from dull gray to technicolor” — as in our first view of Oz in the movie. But the characters don’t evolve over the course of the play, and they have no discernible effect on one another. There are many witty lines in Emerald City, but nothing is gained from Kuntz’s attempt to go beyond his customary monologue format. And the loss of the enormously appealing Kuntz as a performer is considerable.

It’s not that the cast here is untalented. All are engaging, and Perkins is especially good during Midge’s flights into fantasy. Eric C. Engel’s direction is more uneven. The scenes in the bar, with the characters at a curved banquette, have a pinched quality. Like the play itself, they don’t work on either a realistic or an abstract level. But there is an effective set change at the end of the first act, when the bar is replaced by a low-budget but sleek facsimile of the Emerald City skyline. The cast then dances to a recording of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” and we experience the blend of sadness and silliness that Kuntz was probably aiming for with the entire play. Alas, such moments can be as fleeting as rainbows.

Issue Date: April 5-12, 2001