Review: Stars and Barmen by Vortex Repertory Theatre
by Michael Meigs

I was in the mood for a a feel-good experience on Halloween, something without fangs or fishnets or pumpkins, and the Vortex's blurb 'a romantic comedy about getting lucky in space time' enticed me to their staging of Reina Hardy's script. She is semi-local, after all, as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, and the Shrewds staged her piece Glassheart not too long ago.

The Vortex, bless Bonnie's heart, has succeeded in transforming itself from a make-do neighborhood theatre to a social center. The Butterfly Bar appears to keep the place hopping most nights of the week, and there were plenty of folks there for the BYOP pumpkin-carving contest later on. Only twelve of us elected to go to the play that Thursday evening.

In the enigmatically titled Stars and Barmen Trey Deason plays Rupert, a grad student in astronomy so hapless and clumsy that his only intimate companion is the computer program scanning the skies for anomalies -- not the big, blow-out anomalies, but others more modest, perhaps closer to his level of ability. The playwright's not particularly kind to him, setting him up in the opening scene as a lonely party crasher who fails miserably three times in a row to initiate conversations with unseen women. Deason, himself a capable playwright, singer and thespian, swallows the bait and director Rudy Ramirez's instruction, and he turns Rupert into such a mass of inferiority complexes and tics that he's ridiculous and almost painful to watch.

Rupert encounters Bridget Farr as the dreamily disappointed Claire, a self-pronounced poet who's trying to avoid someone at the party. He thinks he's getting through to her in his ungainly way, but that computer program Mandy interrupts via telephone, yanking his chain and obliging him to leave to attend to his late night duties in the lab. He forgets to ask for Claire's number or to get some way to contact her again.

Watching these ineptitudes and witnessing Deason's presentation of the fellow as a quivering, clownish loser, I began to sense that Hardy's idea of comedy didn't correspond very much with my own. Loser guy goes to Craig's List and sends out bleats, getting only come-ons from hookers. One woman Elaine, does show up at the lab, and it's quickly obvious that she's clumsily intent on getting money -- some amount of money, any amount of money -- from Rupert by having sex with him.

Hardy sticks in a lot of talk about astronomy but it's double-Dutch as far as the plot goes. She makes all three of these characters into grotesques, and it's a laudable feat that both of the actresses manage to overcome most of those disadvantages. Director Ramirez cast physical opposites into the roles, suggesting that Rupert's yearning for the ethereal keeps him from connecting with the real world. Farr, stuck with wandering around the set always with a martini glass in hand, has quantities of third-rate verse to pronounce, and we never do get the story of who she is or why she's so desolated. Breanna Stogner as the pushy Elaine keeps coming back to batter at Rupert's defenses; she enlists him as a tutor to help her fake a knowledge of physics for her writing a blog about an imaginary sophisticated alter ego.

We've had HAL-2000 and these days we've got Siri, so Hardy's use of Mandy the computer as the fourth character is anything but novel. Mandy sounds a chime when she's posting a message on the laptop. Rupert's hounded by that emotionless mistress from cyberspace, and he carries out lengthy discussions with her about his quandries. I was initially taken aback to see that Deason the actor was so intent on delivering Rupert's thoughts that he wasn't even feigning the act of reading Mandy's messages.

But Rupert's talking to himself, of course; and Hardy's subsequent plot turns make this more and more evident. Claire turns up in a bathroom mirror, still clutching that martini glass, for an inconclusive dialogue with Rupert; Rupert starts having audible hallucinations; Hardy brings Claire and Elaine together for a dialogue on a rooftop that becomes intimate, perhaps another of Rupert's imaginings.

Unlike Mandy the computer program or Elaine the dream, Breanna Stogner as Elaine is focused and energetic, attractive and alive -- so much so that one has difficulty in understanding the dependency upon Rupert that the playwright asserts is developing. The play's anti-romantic, really, and not very comic at all.

 

Ann Marie Gordon's set is simple and low-rent but enchantingly evocative, assisted by Jennifer Rogers' lighting and Tyler Mabry's sound design. And those revelatory stars and planets dazzle us at the end, as if we'd actually learned something along this star trek.

EXTRA

Click to view the program for Stars and Barmen by Reina Hardy

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Stars and Barmen
by Reina Hardy
The Vortex