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(L-R) Maple Mauney (Elizabeth Harris) tries to
understand Mark Luke Matthews (John Edward
Goodnow) while Anne Frank (Jennifer T. Hurrell) looks
on in "Southern Comfort."
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Wild stuff. There's a lot of it onstage in the New Edgecliff Theatre's (NET) world premiere production of Randall David Cook's Southern Discomfort. This is one of three such premieres on Cincinnati stages this month. (Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival's production of Joe McDonough's A Chance of Lightning and Know Theatre Tribe's staging of Kevin Barry's Track & Field are the other two.)
Southern Discomfort has had many hands on it. NET gave it a public reading a year ago under the direction of Cerasela Stan, who brought the script to the attention of NET's artistic director, Michael Shooner. The current production has been directed by Daniel Selznick, associated with Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City, who worked with Cook to further refine his script. Unfortunately, there's not much payoff for all this attention.
Southern Comfort wants to be a very zany, dark piece of comedy, and at rare moments it achieves that. Unfortunately, a lethargic pace -- inspired by a script that often talks too much -- and a set of performers, each talented in their own right, who never quite jell as an ensemble, prevent it from succeeding. Cook's writing has a lot of humor, but the cumulative effect is too jumbled.
A dysfunctional family of three generations of Southern women (plus a transvestite acquaintance) are gathering for Christmas. (One character tells us, "The stage is one of the few places where the dysfunctional feel at home.") Alcoholic grandmother Dixie (Joan Corey) is directing a community theater production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Local fundamentalists are protesting the production because it's a "downer," not to mention the fact Dixie has cast the burly cross-dresser, Mark Luke Matthews (John Edward Goodnow), as Mrs. Van Damme.
Mother Magnolia (Josephine Keenan) is so depressed she sleeps a lot and never leaves the house, still pining for a husband who deserted her years ago. Her daughters don't care for each other: overweight and cynical Maple (Elizabeth Harris) and Orchid (Sunshine Cappelletti), a big-ego, small-talent star of trashy films. Magnolia has manipulated Orchid's first trip home in five years by lying about Dixie's being at death's door. Orchid's is accompanied by a tense, boorish British agent and publicist, Jessica Anastasia Paris (Jennifer Dalton). And there's Pepsi Smithereen (Jennifer T. Hurrell), Maple's best friend of three hours. Hurrell doubles as Anne Frank, who drifts in and out of Maple's fantasies.
If this all sounds pretty over-the-top, it is ... and more so. Cook has written moments to highlight each character; those cause the comedy's focus to slip from one character to another. We get inside Maple's dreams -- literally -- so apparently Cook intended her to be his focus, although it's tough to warm up to a character who opens the play shouting, "What I fucking hate about Christmas," the subject of an essay she's writing for school. The play concludes with Maple seemingly at peace with herself. But we lose track of her when she spends several scenes locked in a closet. She vacillates between being introspective (monologues that slow the show's more tumultuous intentions) and vindictive (which make her less likeable).
Selznick should have directed his cast to focus more on relating to one another, instead of cultivating individual comic shtick. Keenan is considerably more understated than the rest, while Dalton is so manic (very entertainingly so in juggling a sequence of phone calls) that they appear to be in two different plays. Harris and Hurrell give Maple and Anne's conversations some sensitive dramatic texture, but those scenes so differ from the frenetic slapstick around them, it made my head spin. In several wild physical scenes, Selznick spreads the actors so broadly across the wide set, it's impossible to focus on the action. The show's momentum is regularly affected by awkward scene conclusions followed by inexplicably long pauses covered by kitschy Christmas tunes.
Dan Dermody's set design offers a comfortably affluent living room with a posh chandelier and antiques. But it also includes a tiny kitchen with empty cabinets and a small refrigerator: They are there for script calls for them, not because they look like they belong in this upscale home.
Southern Discomfort is not without its entertaining moments, but Cook's script needs more focus and balance to succeed as a satisfying comedy. NET should be congratulated for helping that cause and advancing the career of a promising writer.
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT, presented by New Edgecliff Theatre at the Fifth Third Bank Theater at the Aronoff Center, downtown, continues through July 1.
