Review: Bob, A Life in Five Acts by Half & Half Productions
by Michael Meigs
Contemporary San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s quirky comedy clicks nicely into the Austin aesthetic. Hyde Park Theatre has done both Boom and Hunter Gatherers over the last couple of years, a sure sign that his work is a bit hip, upbeat, funny and intriguing. Now Joshua Denning of the newly founded Half and Half Productions has put Nachtrieb’s Bob, A Life in Five Acts together with a lively cast and a venue that in itself says worlds about the play’s message.
Bob, a sort of Bildngsroman in theatrical form, is performed in a style best described as living comic book, at that most Austin of locales, Vince Hannemann’s Cathedral of Junk on Lareina Street in south Austin. Nachtrieb’s script calls for a leading actor, the eponymous Bob, and a five-member chorus whose members pop into one role after another as they announce the acts, hail the protagonist and enact the rapid-fire sequence of scenes that constitutes the five announced acts of Bob’s life.
Denning splits the leading role into two, presenting the lithe, open and appealing young Jason Roberts-Miller as our protagonist and replacing him after the intermission with Jim Roberts-Miller, Jason’s self-assured, youthful father.
It’s an adroit turn for a piece devoted principally to the search for identity in the confused culture of the United States. The young R.-M. offers innocent wonder and serious attention, while the elder one is focused and unsmiling, somehow beyond our ken. The physical substitution reinforces the themes of seeking, maturing and trying to make one’s mark as time carries one inevitably through the unpredictable chapters of life and its eventual finale.
Nachtrieb’s lines are short, swift and vivid, and so are the many scenes.(*) Bob’s a foundling abandoned by his birth mother in a White Castle restaurant on Valentine’s Day evening. Waitress Helena discovers him, gazes into his baby eyes (despite strict instructions to the contrary in the White Castle staff handbook), falls hard for him and sets off on a twelve-year duo road trip through America in her Chevy Malibu. Fatally struck by the long delayed aftereffects of eating too much gluten in Chinese food, Helena dies dramatically on the steps of the Art Institute in Chicago. She uses her last moments to tell Bob of his origins and beg that he cremate her. He does so, right there, to the somewhat pained displeasure of the Chicago police, and is left alone to try to solve the great questions: who am I and how can I become a Great Man?
That’s a huge question for any of us. In fact, for all of us. Nachtrieb endows Bob with parodied American popular culture in all its cardboard simplicity and imagery: the White Castle chain, Valentine’s Day, Sam Walton founding Walmart, Robert Oppenheimer exploding the first atom bomb in the desert, the gigantic stone presidential faces of Mount Rushmore. Chorus members court, tease and teach Bob in the many vignettes. But nowhere in the many characters, in the reflected American mind or even in the fantastical sequence of Bob’s experiences is there any fixed reference, code of values or system of beliefs. Bob yearns to be Great without understanding even what it means to be good; the kaleidoscopic unpredictability of succeeding events pitches him into contact with many, but with not one who can serve as confidant and guide.
Bob falls in love but his beloved leaves him, borne oceanward by the tides; Bob encounters Gunther, a hobo on a freight train who turns out to be his true father; he’s mugged by his mother, an addict desperate for a fix. In a literally unbelievable run of luck at a casino, he becomes an immensely rich man. It is said — to use Nachtrieb’s droll formulation —that Bob became a recluse in Mexico, possessing mystic knowledge and charging a would-be adept fabulous sums to speak of it. Nachtrieb’s story is endlessly ironic, told in satisfyingly lively style but as a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The cast’s lively and often gleeful performance takes place principally in the open space behind the Cathedral of Junk, that epic tribute to consumerism and broken dreams. Everyone in the cast except for the two Bobs tells the story with big gestures, mugging, and sharp character sketches. Kelly Matthews makes runaway pseudo-mom Helena animated, credulous and simpleminded, a character with the flair and flare of a rebel without any clear cause. Doug Costello is an endlessly earnest Barney Fife of a policeman, yearning for Helena but representing everything she’s fleeing. Cohen Lewis-Hills, attractive in shorts and red top, is Bob’s elusive love, lost to the waves, and chorus members Emerald Ferrel and Victoria Harrison are just as crisply comic and engaged. Jeff Britt has a great time in the roles of the roulette dealer and Gunther, Bob’s hobo father. He makes the most of Gunther’s rant about the ‘Ringertraum,’ the notion of the circus performer’s greatest and most defining moment — which is, after all, what Bob’s pursuing. If there were any conventional scenery at the Cathedral, Britt would be chewing it.
Appreciation goes to Ben Dickerson for his cheerfully friendly audience sense, exhibited not only as chorus and characters but also in the keyboard work and songs he performs at intermission in tandem with Jacob Lewis-Miller — “Go ahead and take a break; this is just for our own amusement!” We did, and we were amused, too.
Bob, A Life in Five Acts
by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Half & Half Productions
The production runs June 19-21 and June 26-28 @ 7:30PM
Ticket price for this production is $20 for the general public which incudes admission to THE CATHEDRAL OF JUNK as well as admission to BOB: A LIFE IN FIVE ACTS. The June 19 opening night performance is PAY WHAT YOU CAN. Please feel free to bring a blanket and picnic! Refreshments and pie provided by Pie Plante! Tickets can be purchased online atwww.halfandhalfproductions.org
