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Fringe benefits
Pulp from BTW; Beckett by Molasses Tank
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

The lusty glances! The smoke-tinged seduction! The melodrama! The breathy sentences punctuated by quivering organ chords! All the barstool shenanigans that defined the pulp novels of the 1950s are set against a cabaret backdrop in Pulp (at the Boston Center for the Arts through October 15), Patricia Kane’s musical distillation of the lesbian-pulp genre (with songs by Amy Warren and Andre Pluess), which premiered at Chicago’s About Face Theatre in 2004 and is seen here in its regional premiere.

Boston Theatre Works plays up the script’s so-bad-they’re-good double-entendres, frank patter, and stock characters — all hallmarks of the novels Kane adroitly shadows. Pulp fiction was racy, given the sexual discretion of the era, but saved itself from being lumped in with pornography by dishing out some morality lesson at the end. Kane can’t seem to decide whether she wants to poke fun at or pay tribute to the prefeminist works that inspired her. But one is inclined, as the play rolls on, to assume the former. Why else the gratuitous musical numbers or the caricatured personalities, among them Pepper (Stephanie Carlson), a bartender as bubbly as champagne? She spouts movie trivia with the same reckless enthusiasm with which frosty lady-killer waitress Bing (Whitney Cohen) has flings.

Set in 1956, the piece takes us through the escapades of tough-shelled Terry Logan (Dayle Ballentine), who has just ditched the WAC after a back-seat roll with a general’s daughter. Her tag line — "I’m a lesbian, plain and simple. I don’t make any bones about it!" — sets the noirish tone. (Think: "Just the facts.") Terry lands at the Well, a Chicago watering hole, where a gaggle of gals welcomes her. Director Jason Southerland sets about creating a cabaret ambiance by selling beer and wine in the lobby and allowing audience members to knock it back at the cocktail tables where they are seated. And the actors supply dimension to Kane’s intentionally flat characters. Ballentine brings a macho swagger to the confident but tormented Terry, and Maureen Keiller exudes a Bette Davis-esque glamour as Vivian, the Well’s repressed owner/mother hen, who fronts a cosmetics empire and keeps her secrets neatly stowed in the closet.

Whereas Pulp shines the flashlight on a rarely examined subset of fiction, Molasses Tank Productions, which specializes in obscure works by major playwrights, blows the dust off six short plays by Samuel Beckett, calling the bill Acts of Futility (at the Charlestown Working Theater through October 22). The sextet captures Pozzo’s observation in Waiting for Godot that "they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more."

With a sharp eye for Beckett’s stark minimalism and resolute pessimism about the human condition, director Steve Rotolo collaborates with area sculptor Pat Keck — an appropriate pairing, given that Beckett was interested in creating the "literature of the unword." And Keck is not the first visual artist to be drawn to the Irish absurdist. For Dublin-based Gate Theatre’s Beckett on Film project, British artist Damien Hirst directed Breath, which is likely the shortest play in history, clocking in at about 35 seconds. It appears here like a Polaroid of the exercise that keeps us alive. But Keck’s sculptural touch is most evident in Act Without Words I and Act Without Words II, mimes that consist only of actions — mostly failed attempts at everything from survival to suicide. Keck’s contribution to the movement results in a visual essay on Beckett’s existential musings. Even if the actors are not uniformly adept at the required mime skills, Rotolo and Keck home in on the morbid whimsy of Beckett’s conception.


Issue Date: October 14 - 20, 2005
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