Review: Pennybags and Henny Penny: Financially Farcical CRASH AND BURN at Theatrical Mining Company

"It's a rich man's world," sings ABBA in a song played before the beginning of Robert Bowie Jr.'s farce Crash and Burn, now being presented by Baltimore's Theatrical Mining Company at the premises of the Fells Point Corner Theatre. But if so, what to make of the client/attorney matchup at the center of the play?

What is an unapologetically rapacious international financier, one who helped precipitate the 2008 recession and is now distorting the presidential election with his donations, doing hiring two painfully small-time Baltimore attorneys to defend him against serious criminal charges? Obviously, the same sort of thing Commissioner Dreyfus was doing putting Inspector Clouseau on a case: banking on someone else's ineptness for his own ends. The client here, Milty (John D'Amato) wants his criminal defense to fail, because for complicated reasons that failure will end up making his lawyers the fall guys.

To that end he could hardly have chosen more fitting counsel than Crash (Jonathan Ingbretson), a criminal lawyer who apes the diction of My Cousin Vinny but lacks Vinny's weaselly intelligence, and Burn (Tom Piccin), an estates and trusts lawyer who fears his own shadow.

Such dramatic suspense as exists in the play hangs on the question whether it is possible Milty has outsmarted himself (perhaps out-stupided himself might be a better phrase) by retaining two such paragons of dimness, greed, and vanity to represent him: Might they fail at failure?

In a farce, the answer to such questions is generally a foregone conclusion, since farces generally do not exist to challenge the social order. Marriages threatened by infidelity, for instance, always survive in a farce, and usually the infidelity itself fails even to come off. The idea of unpunished or even successful transgression is typically played with and then put away like an amusing but dangerous toy.

Bowie here tries the unusual, however, by making Milty, although a figure of fun, a rather specifically-described perpetrator of recently notorious successful rapacities. A bit like a James Bond villain chortling over his evil plans, Milty claims credit for the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market, and for various financial exploits that track what is known about Donald Trump's business methods, and for a Citizens United-type attack on the integrity of the U.S. election system. In other words, combine Goldman Sachs with Donald Trump and with the Koch Brothers, and you basically have what Milty is supposed to represent. In presenting this character, Bowie at least makes a feint at seriousness.

Maybe another actor could pull it off. John D'Amato, who seems to have difficulty even articulating his lines, is not the performer who can sell himself as the perpetrator of such a Gargantuan and varied collection of villainous deeds. Someone just a little more articulate and glib, someone a tiny bit more like Damien Lewis' Bobby Axelrod in last year's Showtime series Billions, might be able to do it. D'Amato, by contrast, reminds one of Rich Uncle Pennybags, the tycoon we all know from Monopoly game cards, and projects no more plausible menace than Pennybags does. Gone missing with the credibility, however, is a credible social critique.

So no, no one in the audience is going to take Milty seriously or anything Bowie might be trying to say with him as a character. As presented here, Milty is as much of a buffoon as are Crash and Burn. They are all going to flail around in a universe devoid of real menace from start to finish.

Observing their flounderings with dismay are Crash and Burn's secretary Ophilia (Penny Nichols) and night cleaning woman (or is she something more?) Brenda (Jessica Taylor). It is a tried and true trope of comedy to have the women, wiser and less excitable than the men, watch over and right the missteps of the helpless males. And the show begins early to build toward that way of doing comic business via an opening expository dialogue between the two of them in which Ophilia explains the failings of her bosses to Brenda, and establishes a female camaraderie between them. But in the later going, when the men are literally running around the set panicked, the women join in, more Henny Penny than Moneypenny, squandering a useful comic dynamic. This is a particularly painful loss with Penny Nichols, who, until the script requires her to abandon sang froid, presents Ophilia as strong and self-possessed, and seems to be setting her character up to save the day. One would have relished seeing an actress with Ms. Nichols' evident comic timing do that.

There are several things that would tighten up this play, apparently in its first production. One would simply be to clarify a number of plot points that are confusing. I could never work out who owned a red Porsche of which the script makes a great deal, or who was actually driving it at the time it violated various traffic laws. I never could work out, either during the show or in retrospect, who (until it was brought forth in the end) had possession of the MacGuffin, a large trove of cash and bearer bonds, ill-gotten gains that Milty intends to spirit out of the country, or what was the significance of there being two prominently-displayed litigation bags on the set, either of which could have been the repository of that trove. I could not work out until it was too late to matter the romantic dynamics among Ophilia and the two lawyers she works for. And especially, I could not follow what Officer Foote, the local constable (Ian Smith), thought he was doing a lot of the time. Foote seemed to be acting effectively as a private investigator on behalf of Milty, after Foote had arrested him. Poor Mr. Smith, charged with portraying Foote, looked as confused as I felt.

It may not matter all that much. The point of plays like this is neither author's message nor plot coherence nor character development. If they serve as what the Mikado called "a source of innocent merriment," farces have discharged their most important duty. The laughter through the near-capacity audience the night I was there convinced me Crash and Burn was living up to that responsibility.

Crash and Burn, by Robert Bowie Jr., directed by Barry Feinstein, through August 14, presented by Theatrical Mining Company at Fells Point Corner Theater, 251 S.Ann Street, Baltimore, MD 21231, as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Tickets $15 at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2571514. Adult language, mild adult situations.

Pictured above (L to R): Tom Piccin, Jessica Taylor, John D'Amato, Penny Nichols, Ian Smith, and Jonathan Ingbretson. Photo credit: Harry Bechkes.

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