Marrieds Oliver (Alastair Whatley) and Emily (Emily Bowker) enter arguing in Torben Betts’s Invincible, at 59E59 Theatres. She’s outraged that he’s rejoined the Labor Party. She believes, as he doesn’t completely, that the Labor party has long since sold out. (Obviously, the Betts’s drama was written before Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent strong showing.)
The opening high decibel level holds, because Emily isn’t prone to lowering her voice on any subject, no matter how it might affect the (never seen) sleeping offspring. She does pull back when neighbors Dawn (Elizabeth Boag) and Alan (Graeme Brookes) arrive for get-acquainted drinks, since urban-oriented Oliver and Emily are new in the lower-scale bedroom community and hoping to fit in.
When buxom, seductive Dawn busts—er, bursts—through the door and followed by burly, compulsive talker Alan, Emily is challenged to maintain her equanimity. When Alan brings over his paintings (this after Dawn and he have been baffled by the Jackson Pollock-like canvases hanging on the Emily-Oliver living room walls), he insists that Emily express her honest opinion about his work.
Not inclined to soften the response, Emily is brutal. (From the audience perspective, Alan’s paintings of his cat Vince don’t look quite as bad as Emily insists they are.) Those comments, the disappearance of Vince, and a secret concerning Vince’s fate become the cause of an increasing rift between the couples—and the increasing intra-couple rifts that unfold during the play’s remaining action.
What’s on view, then, is a play about marriage and the problems that accrue within them. One perhaps unexpected development is the revelation that although Emily and Oliver are immediately shown as drifting close to the rocks, Alan and Dawn are at just as much rock-crashing risk.
Alan Ayckbourn has observed these circumstances in many of his dark comedies, and there is no missing that Betts is under the master’s influence. Not to worry. The two-act work has its mounting effect, certainly as Stephen Darcy directs it (after Christopher Harper’s original direction) for burgeoning tension. He’s got the cast as wrought up as electrified wires—with Brookes especially notable as an initially boisterous Alan who eventually disintegrates into a devastated barrel of low male self-esteem.
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Charles Ludlum loved fooling with the classics, bending (sometimes gender-bending) them to his Ridiculous Theatrical Company purposes. The Artificial Jungle, now revived with great flair at the Clurman by Theater Breaking Through Barriers, bowed in 1986, only a year before the seminal Ludlam died
For this send-up, he was riffing in his comical film-noir-ish way on Emile Zola’s 1867 Therese Raquin. That’s the one in which the title gal, who’s in a loveless marriage falls for an apprentice in her husband’s commercial establishment and plots with the hot lover to eradicate the inconvenient spouse. The enraptured assassins pull off the dirty deed cleanly—or would, if hubby’s live-in mom doesn’t realize what’s gone on.
She would speak but can’t due to a stroke that’s left her unable to get the words out. All she can do from her sitting position is dart accusatory glances at the guilty parties. Nonetheless, those hard looks are enough to make Therese and beau become as besieged by guilt as the monarch-murdering Macbeths.
In Ludlam’s laugh-a-minute update, Roxanne Nurdiger (Alyssa H. Chase) is the slinky wife, Chester Nurdiger (David Harrell) is the nice-as-a-slice-of-white-bread husband, Zachary Slade (Anthony Michael Lopez) is the sexy interloper, Mother Nurdiger (Anita Hollander) is the tongue-tied witness and Frankie Spinelli (Rob Minutoli) is a dominos-playing/police officer friend of the family.
The set-up (flashy set by Bert Scott) is that they all hang out at the home-business outlet that Chester and Emily run and that Zachary renames Artificial Jungle. It’s a pet store, where the owners sell all sorts of living things, piranhas and parrots being the significant fauna here. (Vandy Wood is the puppet designer.
They’re directed by Everett Quinton, longtime Ridiculous member, who knows the material well. He should. He was in the original company, where, for a change, Ludlam and he played Chester and Zachary, rather than women’s roles.
Ludlam’s gift for parody is paraded here shamelessly, and woe be unto patrons who don’t get caught up in the activities, which are—typical of the author-actor—so low style that they’re high style.
N.B.: Theater Breaking Through Barriers has long been devoted to employing so-called disabled performers. Some are present here, not that that has any bearing on the immense fun.
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Attack of the Elvis Impersonators is a confounding musical for which Lory Lazarus wrote the book and lyrics and composed the music in a genuinely triple-threat act of off-kilter bravura.
The what?-huh” tuner is at the Theatre Row’s Lion, not that anyone reading this need make the trek. But for the record, Drac Frenzie (Eric Sciotto), an Alice Cooper-like rock star, decides he’s had it with the weird Drac drag. Instead, he becomes convinced he’s been inhabited by King Elvis’s soul and so must start performing as him.
He tackles this immediately to strange act-two complications —with Zonk TV host Prissy Bordeaux (Laura Woyasz) as his new girlfriend. The major complication, not that it makes any sense, involves Anti-Christ (Jim Borstelmann). During his siege, Prissy is kidnapped and Drac/Elvis has to free her.
All of this is presented with a Lazarus song intended to lift whatever the particular moment. Among Lazarus’s credits is writing “the first original song ever written for Barney the Dinosaur,” which seems just about right.
Don Stephenson, a superb comic actor in his own right, directed The Attack of the Elvis Impersonators and must have had a head-scratching time figuring out how to solve the built-in material problem. Melissa Zaremba choreographed, and Benjamin Rauhala musical conducted, arranged and orchestrated. None of the above should be judged irrevocably on their contributions here. There is—thank the Lord—one praise-worthy contributor. It’s costumer Tracy Christensen. Bows and curtsies to her.
By the way, even the title is problematic. It suggests there will be a gang of Elvis-copying hip-swivelers. There aren’t. There’s only Drac Frenzie in his madness. Is this fraudulent advertising? Who knows? Who cares?