Tall Grass: Splendor In The Audience

At the end of the initial playlet of Brian Harris' innocuous trio of one-act comedies titled Tall Grass, actors Marla Schaffel and Mark H. Dold start making out furiously, with her frantically unbuttoning his shirt, playing oblivious of the stagehands who are changing the set for the next scene.  I believe this is meant to show how edgy the production is.  However, by that time during last Thursday night's performance, making out in the theatre was old news.  That's because the attractive young couple sitting directly in front of me in seats C1 and C2 had been fondling, tickling, massaging, kissing and snuggling each other directly in my line of vision for the entire first third of the evening and continued to do so even after the actors had taken their poorly staged curtain call and had retired to, I would guess, search for loopholes in their contracts that might release them of their obligations to perform in this bland little snoozer ever again.

I'm assuming it wasn't the intermissionless play before them that inspired the young lovers to express their passion so publicly (For the last third of the evening the woman's legs appeared to be draped over the arm rest with her feet between his thighs.) because they were already going at it long before the turn-off-your-cell-phones announcement.  And I don't want to give the impression I was neglecting my responsibility as a theatre critic to pay attention to the production in order to get some cheap voyeuristic jollies.  No, it was simply impossible for me to direct my eyes toward the stage without noticing, for example, how he had leaned forward in his chair so that she could lightly tickle his back before running her fingers through his thick, wavy dark hair.

And if Harris had managed to grasp my attention at any time during the evening, I might have gently asked the pair, who both had that sexy Mediterranean look like they were Italian film stars, to please sit still instead of noticing how the skirt of her modest length dress had been hiked to her upper thigh as she let his hand softly glide back and forth from her knee to a place I would have probably had to lean over to get a clear view of.  (I didn't.)

The three pieces are set up decently enough, but they're all too long and lacking in any kind of humor that goes beyond cute and obvious.  The opener concerns a corporate cog (Dold) who is about to propose to the go-getting woman he loves (Schaffel) just as she receives word that her company has bought out the place where he works, making her his boss.  There's the familiar routine about how every time he tries to pop the question she has to take a call, a waiter (Edward O'Blenis) who enthusiastically proclaims every customer's choice as excellent and a series of voice mail messages heard with the theatre in darkness, giving my neighbors, who by then I had nicknamed Carlo and Isabella, a chance to ravenously thrust their tongues into each other's mouth as cartoon voices of gay and ethnic stereotypes revealed plot information that I'm sure they didn't get.

The second piece was named best play at the Strawberry One-Act Festival in what I would assume to be the year of a severe drought.  In this one O'Blenis plays a burglar caught by gunpoint in the home of Dold, who agrees to let him go if he fulfills an unusual request involving his wife (Schaffel, of course).  In the third play Schaffel and O'Blenis are an elderly married couple with Dold as a con man trying to sell them on a nursing home.

Each story contains an out-of-nowhere last-minute twist, or in this case a deus ex stupida.

Director Nick Corely's cast makes a valient effort, with Schaffel proving herself quite an effective physical comic in the first episode and delivering three thoughtful and contrasting characterizations  O'Blenis is limited by the broad schticky nonsense he's asked to play for the first and third pieces, but is nicely human in the middle one, while Dold is straightfoward and fine throughout.

The most interesting contribution of the night is Cameron Anderson's surreal set, with cutout stairs and chandeliers and an elevated couch sticking out of the wall.  I bet Carlo and Isabella would have made interesting use of that one.

Photos by Carol Rosegg:  Top:  Edward O'Blenis, Marla Schaffel and Mark H. Dold

Center:  Mark H. Dold, Marla Schaffel and Edward O'Blenis

Bottom:  Marla Schaffel and Mark H. Dold

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