Review: The North Plan by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Howls of delight met the finale and curtain call of The North Plan at the Hyde Park Theatre last night, an ovation more ecstatic and spontaneous than any I’ve heard in my six years of theatre going in Central Texas.
Jason Wells’ black comedy about the chaotic breakdown of the United States sometime in the near future is a near perfect dramatic satire set in the jail and sheriff’s office in the mythical backwater town of Lodus, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks.
Street Corner Arts hit the crests two years ago their first time out, with Men of Tortuga, another work by Wells, a Chicago-based actor awarded the 2010 Osborn award for an emerging playwright by the American Theatre Critics Association.
Rommel Sulit, Gary Peters and Joe Penrod from the Tortuga cast are back again for this production. Both Wells plays set up scenarios of conspiracy and mock them mercilessly: Tortuga depicts an intervention in Caribbean politics by a collection of suits with manicures and shiny shoes, and North Plan shows the downhome effects of a U.S. government breakdown and a fascist putsch attempt.
This wildly funny evening is manna for the crowd of cheerfully skeptical youngish theatre-lovers who constitute the primary audience at the Hyde Park Theatre, the sorts who enjoy over-the-edge programming by HPT’s Ken Webster, Mark Pickell’s Capital T Theatre, and the eponymous A Chick and a Dude Productions of Shanon Weaver and Melissa Livingston-Weaver. Street Corner Arts is right up there with them in Austin savvy and gleeful insouciance.
The North Plan opens in the jail behind a sheriff’s office in the remote Ozarks, where Tanya, a bedraggled, loud and angry trailer-trash woman is trying to talk her way out of detention. Her rant directed toward Shona the studious female warden (Kristen Bennett) is lengthy, disconnected and extremely funny. Indigo Rael with her lean, slinky athletic body and controlled fury has played similar characters before, and she burns like an unsecured live wire throughout this show.
A noisy offstage argument erupts behind the audience during Tanya's energetic pleas and imprecations, and then the impertrubable Chief of Police Swenson (Gary Peters) marches in rumpled mid-level former government official Carlton Berg (Rommel Sulit). Rapid fire dialogue from the urgently pleading Berg, interrupted by Tanya’s acid commentary, reveals that Berg has absconded with the enemies list of the repressive would-be government far away in the black hole of Washington, where the Army and Marine contingents are dug in at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, getting ready for a clash.
The North Plan – named for Oliver North, the overreaching lieutenant colonel unmasked during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration – is the story’s MacGuffin, an object of great value that everyone’s scrambling to seize. Berg has hidden it and he wants it to go to muck-raking journalist in Houston whom he trusts.
Putting Rael and Sulit onstage in their respective holding cages is like violently shaking the mixture of a chemical detonator. All she wants is to get out of the pen; all he wants is for her to recover the flash drive with the North Plan from under the noses of the police and the Homeland Security thugs about to arrive. He wants her to shoot them all, if need be; she is more interested in finding out how much he’s going to pay for the dirty work.
During the intermission designers Patrick and Holly Crowley of Dynamic Duo Productions quickly disassemble the bare jail set and convert the space into the front office of the police station. A team of two Feds takes over and rubs everyone the wrong way. Joe Penrod, back in Austin for this staging, is Dale the bureaucratic heavy who interrogates Berg. His instrument of persuasion is a compact electroshock device lovingly nicknamed the “Scalia,” after the most conservative justice on our current Supreme Court. Penrod embodies Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. David Higgins as his pouting junior sidekick Bob Lee provides a fine comic balance. They’re Laurel and Hardy, played by the American Gestapo.
There’s strong stuff here. The depravity of the interrogation and the senior Fed’s arrogance is horrific enough to set your internal alarm bells ringing – as the playwright whacks you with absurdities, mistaken identities and comic business. One of the funniest passages in the play is Dale’s lengthy and bureaucratically entirely credible telephone discussion about obtaining written authorization for summary executions, throughout which he’s being upstaged by desperate business going on behind his back.
Wells gives all of these characters pungent dialogue, sharp clashes and extended farcical turns, all the more comic because they’re so extreme. Each character is vivid, and very soon the audience is intently rooting for the underdogs – not only for Berg and Tanya but also for the reluctantly cooperating sheriff and warden. That's right: the real Folks.
Director Andrea Skola Summers and the cast maintain speed throughout, using accelerating rhythms modulated with attention-grabbing overlapping dialogue, insistent talk, unexpected physical action and threat. Balancing these dizzying developments are some exquisite pieces of silent comedy – particularly Rael’s bluffing, sneaking, hiding and tiptoeing, in pantomimes worthy of a Chuck Jones Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
The North Plan is a fine fit for the Austin demographic, but it's no ideological rant. Comedy arises directly from character and this cautionary farce is anything but unacceptably over the top. Maybe Berg and Tanya are leftie conspirators -- but on the other hand, maybe they're the last wildly disparate resistance against a dysfunctional encroaching central government, Ron Paul liberals carried to the extreme. Comedy occurs in our instant moment, while tragedy hovers mute against the horizon. Street Corner Arts has put a terrific entertainment on stage, and it runs Thursdays - Saturdays, only until December 21st.
Highly recommended!
Note: Appreciating previous Street Corner Arts work, the author contributed to the Street Corner Arts Kickstarter campaign to help fund this production.
The North Plan
by Jason Wells
Street Corner Arts
December 05 - December 21, 2013
All performances at 8:00pm
$15 Advance / Students / Educators. $20 @ door
