BWW Reviews: Ken Ferrigni's OCCUPATION at Jobsite Theater

Steven Spielberg once said, "If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." The plot of Ken Ferrigni's OCCUPATION, Jobsite Theater's current production at the Shimberg, follows Spielberg's advice and can be stated in 25 words or less: In 2017, in order to save America from financial ruin, China purchases Florida, and a group of Everglades insurgents vow to overthrow the occupying Chinese. The show has had productions in New York and Los Angeles, but this is its Florida premiere. Seeing OCCUPATION in the Sunshine State is akin to watching Dr. Strangelove in Moscow (in 1964), or To Kill a Mockingbird in Alabama, or August: Osage County in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. If you're going to see this show, then this is the place to be: Ground zero of hillbilly swamp revolutionaries.

Ferrigni's satiric, smart script is filled with wonderfully dark humor and an ear for surrealist dialogue. If you like your humor like coffee-purists like their java--extremely black--then this show is for you. However, OCCUPATION is a bit too choppy for my tastes. Some scenes (especially in Act 1) seem interminable, while others seem to be just a minute or two long and not entirely necessary. (Short scenes work in musicals, mainly because they usually have a song attached to them, but here it all seemed so haphazard at times.) There's a certain disconnect, where we're unsure where the whole thing is going, but thankfully Act 2 comes along and the show makes total (hilarious) sense.

The production at Jobsite is mostly first rate, and the Shimberg is a perfect venue for a show like this. The Road Warrior-like opening prologue, featuring David Jenkins ingenious videos and news footage, is spectacular. This beautifully crafted opening, combined with Jenkins' equally brilliant sound design, is spot on. (The soundtrack throughout is stellar, with some of the most eclectic music choices imaginable.) Kaylin Gess' set, however, never rises above the pedestrian. I am not a fan of rotating pyramids for scene changes (it seems like such an easy way out), and the signage of Florida favorites (like Publix, Teco and the Lightning, all in English and Chinese), though clever, seem too amateurishly rendered for the fastidious occupiers. The set could have worked equally as well with just the four set pieces at the start of the show, which looked like three-dimensional Cubist paintings, puzzles with pieces missing.

The cast serve the script well. Best of all are Katie Castonguay and Nathan Jokela as Kell and Gare Cartwright, the leaders of the swamp insurgents. Bad-ass Castonguay packs quite a punch in her intensity and feistiness; she's like Sigourney Weaver's Ripley battling Chinese instead of aliens. Do not get in this rebel's way. She is also heartbreaking when it counts, and she's the one the audience roots for most of all. Jokela matches her intensity, her take-no-prisoners passion; he's so powerful that he looks ten feet tall onstage. When these two are the focus of OCCUPATION, the production hits all the right notes.

J. Elijah Cho is appropriately smarmy and cheesy in the part of Deng Zedong, who dons a bathrobe throughout much of the show. His character at first just wants to rock and roll all night and party every day, and with Cho's slick, game show host voice, it works quite well. He's very amusing.

Playing opposite Cho is Emily Belvo as Maria "Mei Mei" Burreuss, sort of a female Benedict Arnold to the Americans. Belvo is a stunning presence, passionate and energetic. She makes the most of her part, but sometimes she seems to be acting in an entirely different play (playing an outsider to both worlds, maybe that's entirely the point).

I don't know what to make of Carlos D. Garcia as a Bible-thumping madman, Florian Hale. In Act 1, he seems to be so stereotypically nerdy, like a high school actor in an improv class who has been told to act the part of a "spastic geek." Imagine a flailing, Apocalyptic Robert Carradine in Revenge of the Nerds to get an idea of what Garcia brings to the part. He certainly channeled his inner Crispen Glover here by being uncomfortable to watch in Act 1. But something strange started happening by Act 2: The young actor started to have some interesting moments. By this time, this character is splattered in torrents of blood splashed on him like a Pollack action painting after experiencing Helter Skelter, and it seems to have made his character's mania make some kind of weird sense. (He reminded me of a blood-drenched Sheldon Cooper, but he's actually much odder than that sounds.) As the play goes on, Garcia gets more tolerable. There were even a couple of moments in Act 2 where the actor made me laugh out loud, such as when he is told he will be on You Tube and perks straight up like some kind of demented fashion model.

Garcia also appears in the single best scene in the play, the one that should not be missed by theatergoers. At one point in Act 2, Florian hallucinates that he is visited by the spirit of his father (a perfectly peculiar cameo appearance via video by local favorite Ned Averill-Snell). The back and forth between these two, with the video image of dear dead dad fading in and out, left the audience in stitches. And Averill-Snell winds up giving one of the best performances of the show. It's as if David Lynch suddenly occupied the reigns of OCCUPATION, and the audience was thrust into an entirely different dimension and dementia. Ferrigni's insanely comedic dialogue here is outstanding; if only the entire show matched the humorous highs of this scene.

There's a sixth character, Bets, a pregnant teen that chugs cheap wine directly from the box, played by Marlene Peralta. Peralta certainly has enough kick-butt attitude in the part, and she totally captured the essence of this preggers Swamp Thing. (I loved that she's naming her child-to-be "Pokemon.") But I found Peralta very hard to understand at times. She spoke so fast, the lines so garbled and the enunciation so poor, that I missed some of Ferrigni's outlandishly clever dialogue.

Ryan Finzelber's lighting works wonderfully, and Katrina Stevenson's costumes match each character appropriately (such as Gare's militia garb and the ripped Siesta Key top that the pregnant Bets wears).

The production is forcefully directed by Chris Holcom. The pacing is fine, and Holcom's staging quite creative, with all the actors moving with purpose (although it was hard for those at the back of the Shimberg house to see any bodies sprawled on the stage floor). But Holcom's sensibility merges well with the show's absurdist leanings and violence. I particularly like the Dr. Strangelove allusion at the end. I won't give anything away, but I prefer the version of the song they use here over Kubrick's Strangelove tune. Then again, Johnny Cash trumps Vera Lynn every time.

OCCUPATION is funny, cutting, off-the-charts bizarre, intense, and yet meaningful. Although it was written years ago, when the United States was mired in a horrendous recession, it still hits home today. Yes, there are some wrinkles in the story to iron out, but the script seems to be just a rewrite away from greatness.

Jobsite Theater's production of OCCUPATION plays thru August 2nd at the Shimberg Playhouse at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. For tickets, please call (813) 229-STAR (7827).

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