Review: House of Several Stories by Imagine That Productions
by Michael Meigs
Think Bart Simson meets Betty Crocker on LSD, with a confident cast and decisive playwright/director who steer a comedy of infantile, broken characters through ambiguous plots and overlapping time to crisis and a touching resolution.
House of Several Stories, John Boulanger's MFA project at Texas State, had a reading at the university and played for just a flicker of time in early October, 2008 at the Blue Theatre in Austin. In April it won the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre competition for best student-written play. Boulanger's back in town under the aegis of his new company Imagine That Productions, and they have done up his script in style.
Members of this cast crackle with charisma. They play in a haunting 1950s-style interior in serene whites, greens and blues designed by Griffon Ramsey. Sue, the mom, is a destroyed prom dreamboat who wears costumes in pink and in spangled green designed by Jillan Hanel. You might consider settling in your seat as soon as the house opens to enjoy 15-20 minutes of bright time-warp vocal pop put together by Craig Brock.
Think Bart Simson meets Betty Crocker on LSD, with a confident cast and decisive playwright/director who steer a comedy of infantile, broken characters through ambiguous plots and overlapping time to crisis and a touching resolution.
House of Several Stories, John Boulanger's MFA project at Texas State, had a reading at the university and played for just a flicker of time in early October, 2008 at the Blue Theatre in Austin. In April it won the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre competition for best student-written play. Boulanger's back in town under the aegis of his new company Imagine That Productions, and they have done up his script in style.
Members of this cast crackle with charisma. They play in a haunting 1950s-style interior in serene whites, greens and blues designed by Griffon Ramsey. Sue, the mom, is a destroyed prom dreamboat who wears costumes in pink and in spangled green designed by Jillan Hanel. You might consider settling in your seat as soon as the house opens to enjoy 15-20 minutes of bright time-warp vocal pop put together by Craig Brock.
This HOSS starts out loud and nutty with characters apparently out of touch with reality. The season is probably Thanksgiving. Lauren Lane as Sue is slugging down the booze, deluded but chipper as a chipmunk, as daughter Rissa (Meredith McCall) and adopted son Bastian (Martin Burke) are visiting for the holidays.
Think Bart Simson meets Betty Crocker on LSD, with a confident cast and decisive playwright/director who steer a comedy of infantile, broken characters through ambiguous plots and overlapping time to crisis and a touching resolution.
House of Several Stories, John Boulanger's MFA project at Texas State, had a reading at the university and played for just a flicker of time in early October, 2008 at the Blue Theatre in Austin. In April it won the Kennedy Center's American College Theatre competition for best student-written play. Boulanger's back in town under the aegis of his new company Imagine That Productions, and they have done up his script in style.
There's lots of loud , happy wrangling between the children, now in their early 30's. Rissa seems lobotomized but hyperactive, unable to remember her age or the facts that she has been married for years and is no longer a pre-teenager. Martin Burke as her brother Bastian is perhaps the sanest of the lot, although he gives in to the childish quarreling with Rissa and tries without much success to awaken his mom Sue from the dream world that has taken her over since their Dad died a year earlier. All of them recur to ritual and play through shared memories, including memories that they fabricated by mutual consent.
The style is sharp, emphatic and non-sequential, continually surprising the audience with the absurdities of these characters. The jokes and timing remind one of a television comedy gone further manic. Once Boulanger has bounced these three sufficiently off one another to make us dizzy, he changes pace, provides Bastian and Sue with monologues that pad their characters with greater humanity, and introduces a mysterious young woman Abigail -- or maybe Constance -- with a baby looking for a mysterious "Tom."
The goo-goo baby is a great comic opportunity. In her bright-eyed fog Lauren Lane appropriates it, dubs it "Quasimodo" and uses it to apostrophize her own children, her vanished husband, and her own failings as a mother. Deranged Rissa immediately becomes visibly pregnant and totters about the set proclaiming the imminent arrival of her own child.
If the playwright/director had remained at that level and pitch, he would have lost us. But in a series of ripples in the plot he brings us alternative realities, including Adam Pearson as a new character with the appeal of his relaxed, confident gravity and the disadvantage of probably being dead. Boulanger plays with our credence, as well. At intervals, dramatic revelations are followed by a blink of the lights and then replayed with different punch lines, leaving us to wonder whether either or both are true in this play's worlds.
Much madness is divinest sense, said Emily Dickinson. The playwright steadily focuses the hysteria of each of these characters and digs out unexpected, echoing channels in their pasts. Those back stories are not resolved, because they overlap and multiply -- did someone use that pistol that pops up so obligingly in Act II? If so, when, and upon whom?
We learn much about Bastian and his feelings of sinking desperation; Sue becomes an emblem for all the mommies left bewildered by the way their lives have turned out. Rissa remains pretty much over the moon. Even the mysterious visitor Abigail (Kelli Schultz) , confounded with the children's imaginary playmates, tells the audience her own story of passion, loss and forgetting, with a wry and not very regretful attitude. The dead guy, if he is there and if he is dead, is attractive, calm and aware.
Boulanger's achievement both as playwright and director is that he starts with loud chaos, exaggeration and absurdity, and he gradually endows his characters and his story with humanity and depth. By the end, we do care about them, despite their irrationality, the way we care about off-the-wall members of our own families.
The intimacy of the Austin Playhouse main stage puts us up close to these actors and to the pain of their characters. This staging reminds us that comedy thrives, in fact, on mishap and timing, providing us the welcome release of laughter as we relish the fact that we are not in these people's shoes.
Not even if they're the bright red patent-leather four-inch high heel pumps worn by Abigail, Bastian's worn tap shoes swiped by Rissa, or the grotesque fluffy-animal slippers in which the (maybe) suddenly pregnant Rissa quick-steps through the second act.
Review by Spike Gillespie at austinist.com, August 11
Review by Barry Pineo in the Austin Chronicle, August 13
Four reviews posted at NowPlayingAustin, including one by Sarah Saltwick, August 18
EXTRAS
Click to view the program for House of Several Stories by Imagine That Productions
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House of Several Stories
by John Boulanger
Imagine That Productions
