Review: On the Verge (or The Georgraphy of Longing) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
"Bebe Rebozo!"
Those two words summarize the wit and triviality of Eric Overmyers' On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing), now playing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University.
I laughted at the sudden illumination of an impression from 40 years ago. Bebe Rebozo - Richard Nixon's buddy. The Florida banker. The guy with the home in Key Biscayne where our Darth Vader president took refuge from the demands of office.
But so what?
Overmyer invents a tale of three Victorian-era lady explorers venturing off to terra incognita. Pith helmeted and wrapped in voluminous skirts, they recount their observations to us and to one another in the quaintly precise language of 19th century journals. The playwright mischievously sends them enigmas and clues that signal to us the fact that these earnest and intrepid demoiselles are journeying in time as well as in space.
As adventures proceed, each of them acquires a mysterious mechanical device that none of them recognizes as a hand-held, hand-cranked eggbeater. It's a joke about the cluelessness of those sheltered Victorians -- the first mechanical egg beater was patented in 1856 and the first electrical model, an industrial tool, was patented in 1885. That joke suggests Overmyer's plotting procedure, as well. To use a slightly more modern metaphor, the playwright has cuisinarted the past century or so of American folk memory and picked from that mess some of the quirkiest bits.
His ladies stride onward through their mysterious brave new world, pausing to tune in -- "osmos," from osmosis -- rich and exotic phrases from the cosmos, a sort of pentecost of the petticoats (the issue of skirts versus trousers is debated over the course of the adventure). They spend a lot of time near mid-century, an epoch that I barely recall and one that's certainly epoca incognita for the student crowd at St. Ed's. A button emblazoned with the lengend "I Like Ike" sparks off a long trope of the search for that mysteriously likeable Ike and a wander through a nightclub world very like that of the "rat pack" of Las Vegas entertainers. There's an encounter with a yeti, another with a sibilant masked oriental fortune teller, and a conversation with a service station attendant, back when they actually pumped the gas for you. Toward the end, Avery Ferguson as Fanny has a lengthy private conversation with the white-suited, knowledgeable Mr. Coffee, who might be God or might just be the Spirit of Popular Culture.
Director David Long likes playful plays for his annual contribution to the St. Ed's theatre cycle. In 2008 he gave us Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9, also with a Victorian adventure setting; in 2009, bobrauschenbergamerica; last year, a wildly clownified Imaginary Invalid. Each of those offered some chewy food for thought hidden inside the fun. Overmyer's clever piece is a "lite" version of the same genre.
Long keeps the action lively with his plucky young adventuresses. The director sends Lindsley Howard, Michelle Elisabeth Brandt and Avery Ferguson scrambling up a rope ladder, poling pretend rafts, hauling themselves up a rockface hand-over-hand on a thick rope and even, in an enchanting moment of theatrical illusion, wading through a swamp, up to their knees in non-existent murky waters.
The writer is pitching concepts and images willy-nilly, as if hoping that some of them will stick, and all the while, Mary, Fanny and Alexandra express themselves in elaborate, well-schooled phrasing. Overmyer's dialogue is often as rich as blank verse, deserving of a good tasting in the mouth, but Long and his players are usually moving too fast to let us savor it. That rhythm is punctuated from time to time by solos that work more effectively, as one woman is captured in a spotlight and addresses the audience as her unseen greater public. Lindsley Howard's are the most impressive.
Perhaps because this is a comedy of image and anachronism, these leading women seem curiously without affect, other than for bursts of enthusiasm. "Wow!" Fanny periodically exclaims as she begins to enjoy this confusion.
Slim, personable Jon Wayne Martin plays all of the other roles with the flair and accomplishment of a born shape shifter. In one of his persona he makes off with one of the ladies into the happy ever after of the 1950's, both of them clad in bright red-and-black bowling outfits; as Mr. Coffee he enthuses with another over the very amazing and never ending newness of adventure. Only Lindsley Howard as the matter-of-fact, indefatigable Mary escapes his allure. Trading those skirts for the more practical and now permitted trousers, she shares a final eggbeater twirl with her friends and then sets off for further high adventure.
Overmyer turns 60 this coming September, so he had that Bebe Rebozo connection floating inside his deep temporal memory. Considering that he has plenty of credits in television screenwriting, perhaps he judges that TV has fed the popular consciousness sufficiently to keep decipherable those zany references to random mid-century images and events.
The young ladies give it their all. There's an added bit of odd spicing to the comedy when one considers that these 21st- century players were probably initially just about as unindoctrinated in the miscellanea of the amazing mid-twentieth-century as were the 19th-century explorers they're playing.
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, March 10
Review by Ryan E. Johnson in examiner.com, March 12
EXTRA
Click to view program for On The Verge by the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St. Edward's University
On the Verge (or The Geography of Longing)
by Eric Overmeyer
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
