Ching Valdes-Aran, Calvin Smith, Lisa Kron and Kimberly Hebert-Gregory in Kron's The Veri**on Play, directed by Nicholas Martin at the Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival through April 1.
The Verizon Play
Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Written by Lisa Kron. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Original music by Jeanine Tesori.
Lisa Kron’s contemporary comedy of communications breakdowns and corporate conspiracies is like a long, weird ramble that cuts out a lot. The comedy is in the chaos, which distorts the play’s calling.
It starts well, with a woman named Jenni (played by Kron herself, in the manner in which she has played herself in a lot of her autobiographical plays) having some friends over and trying to get through an anecdote about how she’d been screwed by the phone company. There’s great “I’ve been there” humor in how she shushes her pals when they interrupt with their own tales of victimization by unfeeling service representatives.
Director Nicholas Martin and a game cast and creative team build upon this misshaped merriment with hordes of changing characters, an international chase scene and various support-group showdowns. Some theatergoers fall in willingly with such hi-jinks, but I tend to see only desperation, a transparent attempt to extend the length of an underdeveloped play. There are several strong performances, with Kron at the unhinged center and a troupe of quickchange character actors (I especially admired Calvin Smith and Hannah Bos) revolving around her.
The pity is, as the fantasy gets more frantic and physical, the empathetic humor of the show’s charming opening gets trampled. The excesses—too many subplots, too many characters, too many vain attempts to eke out one more cheap laugh—get tedious after a while. A lame attempt to mark the piece as some sort of revolutionary moment to rise up against one’s cell-phone oppressors is diluted as soon as it begins through theater in-jokes and a general lack of spine.
Stylistically, The Veri**on Play is a reminder of Lisa Kron’s early works with the New York ensemble The Five Lesbian Brothers, which brought vaudeville clowning and exaggerated characters to stories of female empowerment and changing society. There’s the same anything-goes free-association playmaking anarchy that’s associated with classic FLB works such as Voyage to Lesbos and The Secretaries. What it lacks that those other works had, however, is a point. It’s one thing to spin wild yarns of female office workers casting off the yoke of starvation diets into parodies of Greek Tragedy empowerment. It’s another to run around complaining that the phone company is evil.
(For a much greater ensemble piece about international corporate conspiracies by communications companies, see improv theater pioneer Ted Ficker’s masterful film satire The President’s Analyst from 40-odd years ago; it has essentially the same anixieties and paranoiac jokes, but with more solid intent.)
Since the 1990s, Lisa Kron has reined in her more chaotic impulses to deliver throughtful, challenging and contained autobiographical works such as 101 Humiliating Stories, 2.5 Minute Ride and Well. The Veri**on Play… gee, I hate putting those asterisks into the title; I feel like I’m helping sustain a bad joke about this play’s supposed subversive intent. This is a romp. It’s well-directed (by no less a talent than Nicholas Martin, who works wonders with large casts) and has a culminating song and dance (by no less a talent as Jeanine Tesori of Caroline or Change fame). But its ridiculous attempts to be a call to arms becomes a prank call, a wrong number, a dropped opportunity.