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'The Cherry Sisters' Clockwise from top right: Jonathan Nichols (Footrotski), Joey Honsa (Veruka), Laura Jones Macknin (Basha), and Karin McKie (Gnasha)
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The Coarse Acting Show
inspired by The Art of Coarse Acting (1964) by Michael Green
directed by Steve Scott, Kimberly Senior, Jeremy Wechsler, Shade Murray,
and Nick Bowling
November 15, 2001 - December 16, 2001
Shakespeare's Motley Crew
Athenaeum Studio
2936 N. Southport
Chicago, Illinois 60614
Box office: (312) 902-1500
The Coarse Acting Show is an uneven comic romp. During the course of the performance, Shakespeare's Motley Crew parodies the works of five classic writers as well as the relationship among the members of a small theatrical troupe and its ties with its patrons. These parodies misfire: the humor is so insular, sophomoric, and coarse that it is finally not very amusing. But these parodies are only the framework of The Coarse Acting Show; the artistic center of the production is Michael Green's 1964 text, The Art of Coarse Acting, a hilarious treatise of stage disaster and inadequacy. Shakespeare's Motley Crew's mounting of this treatise on the Athenaeum Studio stage is inspired: the humor is clever, witty, and finely tuned to the parodies. The Motley Crew's ability to artfully demonstrate coarse acting while performing in less than hilarious parodies is marvelous.
The inspiration of the play, The Art of Coarse Acting, is an actor's primer of those facets of a fine dramatic performance that an audience may take for granted and an actor must struggle to perfect. The text teaches the positive traits of fine acting by highlighting the negative traits of coarse acting. According to Green, a coarse actor is "one who can remember his lines, but not the order in which they come. One who performs . . . amid lethal props. The Coarse Actor's aim is to upstage the rest of the cast. His hope is to be dead by Act Two so that he can spend the rest of his time in the bar. His problems? Everyone else connected with the production."
In The Coarse Acting Show the fine nuances of good acting appear to be absent from the parodies of the works of five authors of classic theatre: Shakespeare, Melville, Chekhov, Austen, and Coward. It would likely be just as amusing, if not more so, to chronicle the stage disasters in performances of the dramatic scenes as written by the real authors. However, Shakespeare's Motley Crew has chosen to demonstrate the stage disasters in parodies of the classic works. Each parody has a different author and director. Shakespeare's forest plays become "All's Well That Ends As You Like It," written by Michael Green, the Coarse Acting author, and directed by Steve Scott. Melville's "Moby Dick," is adapted by Michael Green and Michael Langridge, and directed by Kimberly Senior. Two of Chekhov's plays of the Russian landed gentry evolve into "The Cherry Sisters," written by Michael Green, David Pearson, Michael Langridge, Richard Gaunt and John Turner, and directed by Jeremy Wechsler. The Jane Austen spoof, "Pride at Southanger Park," is written by Rupert Bean and directed by Shade Murray. The Noel Coward satire, "Present Slaughter," is written by Jane Dewey and Don Starkey, and directed by Nick Bowling. The parodies are all quite broad: ridiculing very obvious elements of the classical authors' plots, characters, and dialogue. Even though there are different literary sources, and different author-adaptors and different directors for each of the parodies, there is a sameness in the level of humor: they are all performed as boisterous knockabout comedies. However, amidst the slapstick are genuinely amusing snapshots of coarse acting. These moments are slyly clever and witty.
The memorable "bits" of coarse acting include: [in "All's Well That Ends As You Like It"] a forgotten flat representing a tree left onstage during a scene in the castle that the actors attempt to ignore, the prince delivering one of his speeches in obvious iambic pentameter, the lute player out of sync with the sound cue; [in "Moby Dick"] Ahab's cramp in his 'stumped' leg that results in his writhing in pain on the stage -- with two legs; [in "The Cherry Sisters"] the lisp of one of the sisters, the leaking samovar that causes the actors -- in vain attempts to stop the drip -- to ignore their blocking or to leave the stage so that their fellow actors speak to empty divans and into space; [in "Pride at Southanger Park"] music too loud to hear the actors, actors forgetting about a prop -- the stuffed dog; an actor who is not off lines and is reading from the script, actors repeating the same dialogue because one of the actors does not say the precise line, an actor who answers his cell phone while on stage; [in "Present Slaughter"] the leading man coping with a hand bleeding from a wound inflicted by one of those deadly props -- a martini glass.
These moments, which enliven otherwise lackluster scenes, sparkle because of the expert ensemble of fine comic actors: noteworthy in this cast is Nathan Vogt, Michael Dailey, Ed Stevens, Laura Scott Wade, Laura Jones Macknin, Kate Martin, and Karin McKie. These un-coarse actors are provided wonderful performance tools by some very capable designers: Bill Morey's costumes, Patrick Clayberg's set, Ann Noble's properties, Benton Bullwinkle's lights, and Joe Fosco's sound.
In The Coarse Acting Show, there is also a non-literary parody: the premise is that the dramatic scenes are being presented during a fundraiser for The Apocrypha (Theatre for the Common Man), a fictitious 25 year old off-Loop troupe whose motto is "Uncompromising. Unconceivable. Uncritical. Un-for-Profit." This parody, which was written by Penny Penniston, is a take on the Chicago storefront scene complete with jealous rivalries and sexual intrigue. The audience is even given a bogus program that includes the troupe's mission statement, performance history, and bios. This part of the two-hour Coarse Acting Show smacked of a smugness that was actually irritating. Also, as the frame of the dramatic parodies, the fundraiser interludes slowed the pace and timing of the performance -- an effect that is deadly for any comic romp.
--Sandra Marie Lee
The Coarse Acting Show presents an evening of theatrical parodies inspired by Michael Green's 1964 book The Art of Coarse Acting. Thursdays, 7:30 PM; Fridays-Saturdays, 8 PM; Sundays, 3 PM; Sunday, November 18, 3:30 PM; no shows Thursday-Friday, November 22 and 23. $15.
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