Review: The Wedding or the Rebellion by Reckless Youth Theatre Collective
by Michael Meigs
Becca Plunkett's romp The Wedding, or The Rebellion is a Punch and Judy show for young adults. The identities have been shuffled to emphasize how grotesque the culprits are.
Here's a text that glories in vulgar, coarse and offensive language, and a writer who marshals those many and inventive epithets for intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, genitalia, sexual orientation and subjugation into a sideshow that delights a hormone-infused audience, many of them her contemporaries from Southwestern University. She both mocks and outdoes the crudities of popular slang and culture by bulldozing words beyond insult and euphemism into pure nonsense.
Plunkett's jocular program note reads, in part, "By the end of the performance, you will likely see that they have no true meaning - that a cunt muncher may as well be called a flap-floop-foosh-foop, a man may as well be called a pook-poosh-pook-pook, and his genitalia may as well be referred to as a blimp-bampf-boomp-bopper."
The Wedding is more than an exercise in smut and semiotics. From the first moment when we see her slouched on a straight chair at center stage, in chains, bruised and glowering, Mariella is the angry victim in this "cabaret of misogyny." Lee Corkran plays a young lesbian about to be subjected to her mother's tenth attempt to marry her off. Her mother Caroline is at first heard, not seen, as she rattles on and on behind a screen, railing with complaints, accusations, nonsense and non-sequiturs. Lindsey Greer Sykes in that role is the Mr. Punch figure -- the energetic and wicked vulgarian obsessing with bending Mariella to her will, ready to bind and abuse, an exercise in loud pure id. Once she appears, Mom is dressed in madly gaudy attire. She carries out an equally hideous dress and wrestles the resisting Mariella into it. Here's where the verbal abuse starts to bite. Mariella is a cunt muncher and a muff diver who just won't see that the best thing for everyone would be for her to get married.
Encountered by Corkran's sullen silence, Sykes batters her with all those horrid and progressively more offensive epithets and metaphors -- both for Mariella's past behavior and for the pretended bliss that her future groom will soon be providing.
Todd, the tenth potential suitor, appears. He and Caroline the Mom trade loud crass innuendos, both of them harranguing Mariella. Zac Carr as Todd actually resembles Mr. Punch; he's wearing a huge artificial nose that promises an equally impressive Johnson inside his trousers. Todd leers and grins, plainly pleased at the prospect of taming this unruly one. Mom has punished Mariella by swathing her head in an enormous bridal veil that looks more like a gauze explosion. Pastor Frank (Jeffrey Kent Harral, Jr.) appears to do the duty, whether it be carrying out the ceremony or delivering his pastoral joystick either to Mariella or to Mom.
Looming beyond the language is an angry comic plea for escape from the conventional roles and expectations of American society. Not only from the ugly and unnuanced words and images of media media and popular speech, but also -- and less obviously -- from the expectations that a young woman's only possible fulfillment can come from heterosexual romance and marriage. In this tiny world of theatre Plunkett is taking on the entire rationale of what my daughter called the Wedding Industrial Complex.
I like her insouciance, but her direction falls short of her script. Sykes as the horrible harridan of a mom prances, minces and squeals throughout, pushing her voice into sing-song upper registers and talking rapidly. It's an effort to be audibly funny, perhaps to present Mom as the ultimate infantile idiot, but the great disadvantage is that her text is hard to follow. The zing of those insults and words would benefit enormously from a subtler rhythm and timing, giving the audience enough time to digest them. In fact, that talk would astound and shock even more if it were coming from a mom who was playing it calm and straight.
Carr is somewhat better at that aspect of delivery, but he's still too forced. Harral with his bright eyes, grin and melodic boasting is almost as runaway as the others. Harral's touches of blackface minstrel style -- admittedly without the blackface -- provoke some sudden self-conscious laughter from the spectators.
The Wedding or the Rebellion
by Becca Plunkett
Reckless Youth Theatre Collective
Saturday, January 25th at 12:00 p.m.
Monday, January 27th at 9:15 p.m.
Friday, January 31st at 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, February 1st at 10:45 p.m.
Don't be a boochie barbarian, buy your tickets! Online tickets are $12. You can buy them from BUYPLAYTIX. Or you can be super hip and pay $10 for a cash pre-sale ticket. Just contact any of the above-mentioned, and we will get the tickets to you. Yes. Yes, we will.
PURCHASING YOUR TICKETS IN ADVANCE ALWAYS REAPS REWARDS. LIKE:
- A complimentary wedding brunch with champagne and breakfast tacos at the 1/25 matinee.
- Complimentary champagne and wedding cake for performances on 1/27 and 1/31.
- Complimentary champagne and an invite to a late-night wedding reception and party after the show on 2/1. Hip.
