Reviewed
by Jerry Kraft
Even
after winning the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, Italian playwright Dario
Fo remains
better known to most theatre-goers by reputation than direct experience. Only
his "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" is widely produced. Renowned as
a master clown, his comedy is a sophisticated blend of low physical humor, high
intelligence, wild theatrical imagination, absurdist sensibility and biting
political and social satire. In this enormously energetic production,
skillfully directed by Matthew Kwatinetz, all of the elements of his work are readily
apparent. While the political and social issues of "Archangels Don't
Play Pinball"
(1959) seem a bit dated, it remains smartly amusing, occasionally trenchant,
and entirely engaging. The ensemble is talented and exceptionally hard-working,
and while the leads fall a bit short of meeting the demands of this difficult
role, the show itself steams ahead at a sometimes dizzying pace. It's fun and
intriguing and mostly successful.
The
plot is, literally, something of a shaggy dog story. Tiny is duped during a
drunken party into believing that he has married a street-walker, Blondie. Then
begins a dream in which Tiny becomes Sunny, Blondie becomes Angela, and through
a bureaucratic snafu, Sunny discovers that he is actually registered as a dog,
rather than a human being. He enters a dog-pound, switches roles with a Senator
whose pants he borrows on a train, is arrested, interrogated, adopted by an
illusionist who has dogs because he loves cats, and generally enters a sphere
of possibility where little makes sense, normalcy is regulated and licensed,
and anything is possible. Nothing goes particularly well, except his
relationship with angelic Angela, and when he returns to the presumably
conscious world at the end of the play, she is the only thing that remains.
This is the anti-human, mechanized world of silent-film comedy, with the hero
as innocent victim, imperiled by authoritarian and industrial forces. The
comedic influences here are clearly Chaplin, Keaton, the Three Stooges, Mac Sennett
and so forth, but Fo also borrows his moral outrage from Aristophanes and Greek
high-comedy.
Gabriel
Baron is
physically gifted as a clown, and has plenty of energy and momentum, as well as
the endless optimism of the eternally downtrodden. His small stature and nimble
movement is exactly right for this character. What I felt his performance
lacked was the pathos that gives a great clown his soul. When he wins Angela it
feels more like a satisfaction to his weak ego than the critical component that
will fill his heart. Part of the problem was Emily Chisholm's Angela, which also felt more
superficial than it should have been. Particularly in a play where nothing in
the physical world is reliably real, we need to absolutely believe that things
of the heart are real. The romance simply wasn't convincing, and that left a
terrible void in the emotional center of the play. Missing that, we had only
the physical absurdity of the situation, story, and supporting characters, and
while that was greatly amusing, it could not, in itself, be entirely
satisfying.
The
rest of the ensemble played quite well, with outstanding performances from Mark
Boeker in a
variety of roles, and Basil Harris as a man who looks remarkably like himself. I also
enjoyed the smart characterizations of Alyssa Keene and Scott O. Moore. The set design, by Richard
MacKenzie, was
attractive and functional, ingeniously enabling a remarkable variety of locales
while sustaining its intentional sense of theatrical artifice. Dan Dennis deserves particular credit for
his witty and charming composition and musical accompaniment.
"Archangels
Don't Play Pinball" is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable piece of
dramatic arcana. It strives to entertain, and does. It wants to convince us
with arguments for our humanity, and succeeds somewhat. It seeks to make us
laugh and empathize and be dazzled in a fun-house mirror of the fundamentally
preposterous nature of normality, and for the most part, it works. While not
entirely convincing, it is thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable.