Theater Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, at the Gamm
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
There is one big reason to see Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, opening this week at the Gamm Theatre.
Here though, first, are not those reasons:
The play is flawed.
Written by darkly absurdist playwright Christopher Durang in 2009, the farce opens as a Hangover-style, morning-after cringefest where Felicity (Casey Seymour Kim) turns over in bed to discover leopard-print-bikini-clad Zamir (Alexander Platt). She's vanilla, he's ethnically mysterious but just hirsute and mysoginistic enough to pass for an Arab terrorist. And guess what... they're married!
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDurang's signature outrageousness plays well for a while, crescendoing in the Father-Knows-Best living room of her parents. Luella (Wendy Overly) wields a floor sweeper like a 1962 Ladies' Home Journal ad come to life. Leonard (Sam Babbitt) may be puttering with his butterfly collection, or readying a torture chamber for suspected terrorists. He may be part of a shadow government. He may do unspeakable things to Luella.
This is inky-black humor, and potentially lethally funny. But the farce loses momentum and meanders near the end of the first act (very long at 1.5 hours), and completely drifts during act two. It's supersized, and farce needs more than anything to be as tight as Zamir's underwear.
The performances are uneven.
Durang's plays are full of bitterly funny lines, which often twist and turn in intent and direction like a game of Chutes and Ladders. To make it work takes the steadiest committment in every actor. The more natural you make those lines, the harder they hit. If you play Durang for laughs, it stops being funny and stalls out in the doldrums of bad situation comedy.
Unfortunately, not everyone in the Gamm's cast is up to the challenge. Kim's comedic quirks create a twitchy, distracting center to the play, and not a terribly funny one. Alexander Platt's smarminess is better, and Wendy Overly has several truly great moments as a housewife on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Christopher Rosenquest doesn't have the Hank Azaria chops to make the classic Durang waiter, often the obscene Greek chorus, work, and his attempt to handle another role, a torture-chamber assistant named Looney Tunes who spouts cartoon noises in a parody of Tourette Syndrome, falls short. The gaps between these performers keep the Durang machine from driving forward with the momentum it needs to make its absurd situations and dialogue gel into revelation.
But here, in the middle of the flaws, is the reason to see this show.
Sam Babbitt is brilliant.
Aging, sagging, moderately stooped, his baritone getting slightly shaky around the edges, this longtime Gamm actor is a perfect Durang realization - hilarious, threatening, and utterly believable. So committed and clear is Babbitt, so much inhabiting the grotesquely gun-wielding gramps with a sadistic zeal for post-9/11 justice, he's our anti-hero.
From the moment he pulls a rifle on Zamir (and that's early), he's wonderful. You've never wanted a guy to wield weapons more in your life - each draw is funnier than the one before it. Babbitt even makes a torture-scene's grab of long-handled hedge trimmers (Zamir's fingers are at stake) full of such commitment, you really wonder if this night he might just lop them off. And in just the sick way that Durang intends, you really want to find out.
Later in the play, when Felicity tempers Leonard's hostility by comparing Zamir to a fetus (of course Leonard is a right-to-lifer), Babbitt's bellicose face slowly softens and collapses into fear for a little fetus in a mother's belly who's fallen down. "Poor little guy," he says, puddling up, his eyes getting all soft like the Grinch when his heart grew three times that day. It's virtuoso, as is every moment he's on stage.
And thankfully, that's a lot. So prepare for the lapses, caffeinate up for that long first act, and go see Sam Babbitt show us some mean, funny, in-your-face Durang.
Why Torture Is Wrong and the People Who Love Them runs through June 5, The Gamm Theatre, 172 Exchange St, Pawtucket. Tickets $30 and $40. Call 723-4266 or go to gammtheatre.org.
Photos: Above, Alexander Platt (Zamir), seated; Christopher Rosenquest (Looney Tunes), Sam Babbitt (Leonard); below, Wendy Overly (Luella), Sam Babbitt (Leonard). Photos by Peter Goldberg.
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