Rehearsal photo from the Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far, the title one-act of the four-play evening Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far, Nov. 18-Dec. 10 at New Britain's Hole in the Wall.
Unlike Jacques Brel, who is alive and well and living in Paris, Jacques Lamarre has gone too far. At least that’s the view of New Britain’s Hole in the Wall Theater, which is producing four of Lamarre’s one-acts Nov. 18-Dec. 10 at their hole in the wall at 116 Main St., New Britain.
“I kind of work in a fever,” Lamarre said in a phone interview last week. He caught the solo playwriting virus rather recently, churning out “close to a dozen one-acts” and three full-length plays in the past couple of years. As a collaborator, Lamarre’s been busy for much longer, co-concocting eight shows for the divine Varla Jean Merman, the glamorous cabaret provocateur whom Connecticut audiences also know from the Hartford Stage and Long Wharf Theatre co-production of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep in 2004.
“I ruminate on them for a while. When I finally find the time to sit down and do it, the writing happens very quickly.”
Lamarre pitched the idea for the show himself at one of the democratically run HITW’s general meetings. He’d worked with the company previously on a benefit performance of “R-Rated Mark Twain”—an extension of Lamarre’s day job as Manager of Communications & Special Projects at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford. Before joining the museum, he was well known in the regional theater realm—not as a writer but as a marketing specialist and publicist for Hartford Stage, TheaterWorks and the Yale Rep.
Considering Lamarre’s comfort in theater climes, it’s surprising that he doesn’t insinuate himself into the production process. But when his Grey Matters was produced in New York, he only attended “one half of a rehearsal,” and has been to only a couple of rehearsals for the Hole in the Wall show. He did make a few suggestions early in the game. There was talk of doing the four one-acts with a tight, flexible ensemble, but one of the glories of community-based theater is the availability of lots of actors. Each play in Has Gone Too Far has a different cast and a different director.
“I brought eight one-acts. In the end they picked three, and asked me to write a fourth one based on the title Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far. They suggested that title by the way,” Lamarre illuminates, which he finds amusing since Varla Jean Merman calls him “Too Far Lamarre” whenever he crosses a taste line in one of their cabaret scripts.
“I wasn’t sure there was a guiding philosophy to the ones they picked, but as a whole it seems they’re really all about bad behavior in America. I kind of wish they’d picked this play I did called Miss Corrupticut, which is a pageant where the contestants are Ganim, Perez, Rowland and Giordano. I hope that one will get done someday, but you could only do it in Connecticut.”
The four plays Hole in the Wall is doing are described in a press release thus: In Mignonette, directed by Bethany Sanderson, an encounter between two women in a dog park turns into a cat fight. In The Buck Stops Here, directed by Michael Daly, a frustrated housewife engages the services of an ad agency to give her husband a marketing makeover. In Cain DisAbeled, directed by Terri D’Arcangelo, a FarmVille fracas between brothers turns into a battle of biblical proportions. And in Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far, directed by Kit Webb, the Disneyfied town of Celebration, Florida gets turned on its Mickey Mouse ears when the title character moves in next door to a pack of Tea Party Patriots.
Rehearsal shot of Cain, DisAbled, from Jaques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far at the Hole in the Wall Theatre.
When writing, Lamarre finds that “I have little empathy for the characters. The goal is to do something funny. I’m influenced by things like John Waters—the earlier stuff, like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble—and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. I like that comic anarchy. But what I really like is not stopping the comedy to find the soft spot.” This leads to a rant about movies such as Bridesmaids which, despite their intended comic chaos, feel an odd need to stop the film short with emotional confessions or somesuch.
Lamarre offered Hole in the Wall his plays royalty-free—always appreciated by financially strapped small theaters which nonetheless want to present new work. LaMarre gets an honest showcase for his writing. He’s entered new-play competitions and done pretty well at some of them, but those efforts rarely end in full productions. “Contests are like throwing your work down a hole. So instead, I’m doing them at Hole in the Wall.”
But Lamarre’s also going too far in other directions. Last Sunday the Hartford Opera Theater premiered composer Philip Martin’s 12-minute opera based on LaMarre’s play The Family Plan. Martin and Lamarre have plans to add two more acts and expand the piece into a full-length opera. Two nights before that Hartford Opera “New in November” performance, Lamarre’s one-act The Rub was presented as part of a new-work night by the Floating Theatre at the Buttonwood Tree in Middletown. Quite the well-traveled writer.
As he says of the one-act which bears the same title as the Hole in the Wall anthology—Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far—“I just wanted to get in that world and fuck with it.” Well, a lot of nearby worlds are welcoming him. Too much!
The Buck Stops Here, one of the four plays in Jacques Lamarre Has Gone Too Far. Photos courtesy of Hole in the Wall Theatre.