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[Theater reviews]

Odd couples
There are many to buy at the Market

BY CAROLYN CLAY

AMAZONS & THE IMPERIALISTS AT THE CLUB CAVE CANEM
By Robert Auletta and Charles L. Mee, respectively. Directed by Erin B. Mee. Set design by Gordana Svilar. Costumes by Harriet Voyt. Lighting by John R. Malinowski. Musical score composed and performed by Neptune and Jessica Rylan Can’t. With Robert L. Devaney, John Kuntz, Sarah Newhouse, Jon David Weigand, and Christen Clifford. At the Market Theater through May 6.

It is curious, given his edgier ambitions, that Greg Carr built a theater that looks more like the Harvard Club than La Mama. But Harvard Square’s brand new Market Theater, an elegant and intimate space in a town starved for performance venues, is mightily welcome. And its opening offering, if out of kilter with the posh surrounds, proves delightful and surprising. The audience takes its plush pink seats on the floor of the 100-plus-seat house where Grendel’s Den used to be. Enter the art-rock band Neptune, who construct their own instruments out of scrap metal. With Jessica Rylan Can’t, whose medium is electronic noise, the band have composed a score to intersect with a bill of short plays from the late 1980s: Robert Auletta’s hilariously paranoid monologue Amazons and Charles L. Mee’s amusing satire of what passes for modern communication, The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem.

Gluing the evening together, along with Neptune and Can’t, is director Erin B. Mee (daughter of playwright Mee), who also directed The Imperialists in its 1988 Joseph Papp Public Theatre debut. The connection between the pieces themselves is minimal: “cave canem” means “beware of the dog,” and Amazons features a dog that would better beware. Still, Neptune, with their rumbling guitars and metallic percussion, provide an unexpectedly delicate underlay for Amazons; and their droll performance interludes, part of the fabric of The Imperialists, fit the tongue-in-cheek surrealism of Mee’s satire. Moreover, the bursts of noise in which Neptune collaborate with Can’t, a bespectacled young woman who throws herself fully and fascinatingly into the production of electric screeches and whooshes, are liberating. I can’t say that I fully understood the sound design, or for that matter the columns of fish whimsically converging on Gordana Svilar’s set, but I enjoyed the assault.

Amazons is the more straightforward of the plays, a monologue by a threatened male who has finally lost it. Chaz, as he informs us, was “an American aristocrat,” flexing his manliness in the Connecticut suburbs and enjoying the ministrations of a young wife with “proper” Southern training in husband worship, when three gorgeous women, sporting archery equipment, moved in next door. Eventually our hero-in-his-own-mind lost his wife and his beloved dog (named Eisenhower, in case you can’t guess Chaz’s favorite era) to his increasingly mad, hate-fueled obsession with what he is convinced are ancient warrior women “re-emerged in Connecticut, within commuting distance of New York City.” Of course, as we learn, the line between love and loathing is blurred, and the action that finally brings Chaz’s breakdown to public attention is pretty grotesque. Auletta’s writing is adroit, and the Amazonian metaphor takes some funny twists. And Robert L. Devaney, fully committed not just to the swaggering Chaz but to the only slightly less snarling Eisenhower, imbues this misogynist in meltdown with a goofy appeal.

Mee’s play is an odder but clever duck in which three comic variations on a theme of empty, decadent relationships are interspersed with elements of postmodern performance. The two streams come together in the final scene, in which half of a trashed couple lolling around on a trashed bed tells the other half a rambling story about becoming inadvertently part of a performance titled “Patterns of Interference.” But the play begins with a Storyteller, portrayed with characteristically merry charm by John Kuntz, telling the tale of Cinderella with all the consonants on the wrong foot (rather like the heroine’s “slopped dripper”).

There follow three La rondelike encounters, presumably in bedrooms of the edifice of the title, between couples whose members are talking to — and of — themselves while pretending to relate to each other. In the first, Sarah Newhouse is a hippie-dippie type full of bizarre tales of accidental death and out-of-body experience; she’s lying fully clothed in bed with a preppy fellow — lent a robotic suaveness by Jon David Weigand — whose own stories have a “moral” and a “point.” Weigand reappears, in a trendier guise, accompanied by Christen Clifford as a name-dropping music-industry maven with a dominatrixy demeanor and some strange rants about political screwing. Weigand counters with tales of the various looks he has appropriated in pursuit of himself. Clifford returns in the final vignette, in cinched black underwear, smeared lipstick, and a stupor, to engage in some intense non sequitur with an equally befogged fellow portrayed with stoned concentration by a Devaney who’s trying to pull his lank hair into an upright position.

The Market, which is the project of founder Carr and director Tom Cole, is intended to run on risks rather than subscriptions. It promises programming that will be eclectic and unconventional. Certainly this first offering manages to be that in a single evening. What’s more, the professionalism on view vies with the imaginativeness. My one caveat is that, even in a prime seat in an intimate space, one can’t always see. It’s the audience rather than the fare that needs elevating.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001