Review: Encore Performing Arts' SORDID LIVES Forages for Fun in a Funeral at Dr. Phillips Center's Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater

"I haven't laughed so much in my life," the audience member me behind remarked as curtains drew to a close. A fellow patron to my right turned around and declared, "Neither have I!" The two instantly bonded over how much they loved SORDID LIVES, a self-proclaimed "black comedy about white trash" - the latest production from Encore! Performing Arts.

As happy as I was for those patrons, and much of the audience who shared in their delight, I wish I could have said the same.

Don't get me wrong, I have loved Encore! Performing Arts since discovering their work nine years ago. Having been a faithful patron in that time, I've loved every production of theirs. Recalling the powerful choirs of AIDA still brings chills, Meg Stefanowicz's belting of the titular CABARET lives in my head rent-free, and the entirety of HEAD OVER HEELS will forever be my favorite. But there must be exceptions that prove the rule; SORDID LIVES, unfortunately, is that exception.

This is, in no way, a reflection of the talent on that stage. Encore! has always brought It to every production. With SORDID LIVES, they continue to pool together the best talent in Central Florida both on and off the stage who turn in terrific performances of wildly over-the-top characters. I've seen a few of these performers in past Encore! productions, while several were new to the company but local to the area. And, in a fun first, Encore!'s own scenic designer Cliff Price took an on-stage role, bringing down the house as Earl "Brother Boy" Ingram.

Each Chapter of SORDID LIVES begins with two isolated performances. Firstly, Katy Williams comes onstage as Bitsy Mae Harling, singing a country song that will be reflective of what each Chapter entails. Next, we zero in on Ty Williamson (Weston Allen Kemp), a former soap opera star turned theatre actor who has been through twenty-seven therapists in three years. Ty uses therapy to talk through his own conflicts and issues about not just his homosexuality, but also the possible fallout should the folks in his small town of Winters, Texas ever find out. After each of Ty's therapy sessions, we then head to different parts of Winters to see how his small town is doing.

Chapter One takes us to the living room of Sissy Hickey (Amy Martin Cole), the bereaved sister of dearly-departed Peggy Ingram. Sissy picked the wrong week to quit smoking, so must cope with her pangs for nicotine through a rubber band on her wrist. Peggy, it turns out, died suddenly in a freak accident at a motel where she was carrying on an affair with her daughter's best friend's husband. (Yes, you read that right.) As friends and family stop by to share their condolences, Sissy must also deal with the public humiliation. Noleta Nethercott (Jennifer Roman) is beside herself since her husband G.W. was the one involved with Peggy. Then Peggy's two daughters Latrelle (Ame Livingston) and Lavonda (Amy K. Hughes) get in an argument over whether or not to bury their mama with a Mink Stole. Latrelle is Ty's mother, and in denial of his own homosexuality. She's also in denial of it in her brother Brother Boy (Cliff Price), who's been institutionalized for the past twenty-three years after getting beaten up for said homosexuality.

When we reach Chapter Two, we see what the social scene is in the sleepy Texas burgh. G.W. Nethercott (David Lowe) has been grieving the only way he knows how: through drinks at Bubba's, the bar where he and Peggy would frequent with their friends Juanita (Kristina Jimenez) and Bitsy Mae. Wardell Owens (John T. Gardner) runs the bar, with his brother Odell (Hunter Rogers) as another regular. Odell struggles to tell G.W. some cockamamie story about a pig that traumatized him. Calamity ensues when Lavonda and Noleta come in fresh from a viewing of Thelma and Louise, with their guns blazing and ready to enact some emasculating revenge on G.W. and Wardell, the latter whom we learn had beat up Brother Boy all those years ago. Juanita, the town drunk, interjects throughout the confrontation as excited spectator to it all.

We finally get to meet Brother Boy (Cliff Price) in Chapter Three during yet another failed "dehomosexualization" therapy session with the ethically-challenged Dr. Eve Bolinger (Natalie Hightower). She wants to cure him of his homosexuality, if only to appear on "Oprah" and become famous. Brother Boy, dressed as country singer Tammy Wynette, has been willingly unhelpful in her quest. Having been locked up for twenty-three years, he's grown comfortable in his sexuality and sees no reason to change. He just wants to leave and go home.

By Chapter Four, the funeral service for Peggy Ingram, all things come to a head. The town comes together to mourn the loss, but as has been evident through the previous three Chapters, hilarity ensues. Secrets revealed, lies spread, stoles get stolen. It's a fracas and a farce with every character amped up to eleven. And, again, the Encore! Performing Arts production company delivered. They made these characters endearing for the audience. Throughout all four Chapters, the Encore! players greatly entertained the crowd at the Alexis & Jim Pugh theatre. If laughter could be quantified and measured as a source of energy (oh, hi there, Monsters, Inc.), I reckon the evening's share could have kept downtown Orlando's lights on for a week.

The themes that SORDID LIVES presents can be pretty heavy: grief, infidelity, closeted sexuality, self-loathing, parenthood, you name it. But it's filtered through a black comedy lens that is meant to off-set the weight of these issues by allowing the audience to both identify with traces of these themes in their own (not-so-sordid) lives, and getting a chance to laugh at it. If good taste can be measured in laughter, then one could argue playwright Del Shores struck gold with SORDID LIVES. But, for me personally, the play simply does not deliver on its promise. Much of my evening was spent with a calm face, although the occasional chuckle did come out at lines - few and far between - I thought were genuinely clever. Again, the performances were stellar, the talent always top-notch. But their talent deserves stronger material than what SORDID LIVES offered.

The original play and subsequent independent film received middling reviews, but still struck a chord with LGBTQ audiences who turned it into a cult classic on par with other camp comedies - intentional or not - like Mommie Dearest and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the twenty-seven years since SORDID LIVES first made its way on stage, a national tour and plenty of local productions popped up in its wake. A prequel television series and sequel film expanded the SORDID LIVES Cinematic Universe. But none of it seems worthy for a story that, for all intents and purposes, wants to be the "Dallas" of campy black comedy, but has more in common with "Texas," a short-lived spin-off of the daytime serial "Another World," whose stories meandered for over two years before mercifully ending on New Year's Eve, 1982.

"Texas," for those who are interested in some deep-cut soap opera history, was created solely to keep Beverlee McKinsey at NBC. She had spent eight years as the love-to-hate villainess Iris Carrington on the hugely-popular "Another World," but wanted out. Neither NBC nor "Another World" parent company Proctor & Gamble wanted to lose her. So, in 1980, they devised a way to keep her on by giving her a starring role in her very own soap, spinning off Iris to live in Houston, Texas, thus tapping into the "Dallas"-mania that had gripped the nation thanks to "Who Shot J.R.?" However, "Texas" ended up a dud because the new fictional families - the Wheelers, the Bellmans, the Marshalls - simply couldn't compete with its 3.00 p.m. timeslot competition: mega-popular "General Hospital" and revitalized veteran "Guiding Light." And rewriting Iris as a leading character, softer and now more romantic with her childhood sweetheart Alex Wheeler, turned away the "Another World" fans who loved Iris as a scheming bitch. McKinsey knew the show was terrible and left a year later. And "Texas" limped on another year with a focus on younger, less interesting characters ("The New Generation!" the show's announcer would say) before that experiment was also deemed unsuccessful.

SORDID LIVES, with its affairs and its family secrets and its larger-than-life characters, is very much a soap opera made funny. For every dramatic trope a soap opera falls victim to, SORDID LIVES leans into the comedy of it. Yet it doesn't quite understand why things are funny, why characters should be funny, why the audience will laugh at one line but not the other. Characters like Juanita the Town Drunk serve simply as court jesters, offered no character arc of their own but egging the audience on to laugh both with and at them. The repressed nature of Latrelle makes her someone worth laughing at because of how uptight she is, but her ping-pong mood swings in the Chapter Four revelation never feel true to her character and just written to suit another character's needs. And the late-stage outing of the late Peggy herself does not feel genuine or earned, but merely another grasp at a straw to give SORDID LIVES more drama than "Dallas" and "Texas" combined. As a story and a play, it simply does not deliver.

Still, Encore! Performing Arts recognized within SORDID LIVES the chance to embrace the hilarity. They saw the potential for comedy on the stage where none existed on the page. Show director Michael Rodgers managed to turn the book of SORDID LIVES into a working comedy, and it shows through the performances. On the page, Chapter One focuses on the Ingram girls in a scene that basically is Steel Magnolias-lite, but Amy Martin Cole, Jennifer Roman, Amy K. Hughes, and Ame Livingston elevate it to straightforward drama within their world that still manages to elicit laughter within our world. That's the hallmark of any good black comedy: everyone plays the story straight, it's only us as the outsiders who find the situation hilarious. While I have my qualms with SORDID LIVES in its literary sense, as a performance, all involved still delivered in spades.

Perhaps that is one reason why SORDID LIVES, for all its faults, has become so beloved. Turning a struggling script into a great performance sounds like an artistic challenge that many would be willing to accept and complete. The bawdy, raucous nature of SORDID LIVES' approach to comedy would still involve a good time for the spectator. Chapter Three's two-fer between Cliff Price and Natalie Hightower was arguably the most popular among the audience. Price embraced the Brother Boy role right down to his toenail polish. And he managed to turn some of the less exciting dialogue of the scene into moments of side-splitting laughter from the audience. Even the delivery of the simple word "Okay" ended up elevating moments within the scene because all the subtext beneath "Okay" was understood and readable on the stage. What starts as a friendly conversation between doctor and patient becomes a heightened confrontation between two, diametrically opposing viewpoints on sexuality.

If anything, the therapy sessions of SORDID LIVES were where the play's book was strongest. In addition to Price, Weston Allen Kemp as Ty proved far more interesting than the hijinks of his small town. There was a sense of "we're getting somewhere" in Ty's therapy. A progression through his issues that led to a more satisfying character arc for Ty compared to most anyone else in the show. Kemp delivers his therapy monologues with the same sense of gravitas as the popular Dark of the Top of the Stairs audition monologue ("I always worry that maybe people aren't going to like me, when I go to a party."), but he's not selling it as an audition. He's sitting down in that armchair, trying to get comfortable, as he relates his life to a therapeutic audience willing to listen. Truly, I would have preferred an entire two-act play with Ty's therapy sessions in counterpoint to Brother Boy's than the four-chapter tour-of-the-town format that SORDID LIVES ultimately is.

One thing I did love about SORDID LIVES was how Encore! managed to turn that stage at the Pugh into a world as Big as Texas. Cliff Price's set design adapts the stage into Sissy's home, Bubba's Bar, Brother Boy's mental institution, and the Southern Baptist Church all at the turn of large wood panels in the shape of the Lone Star State itself. Even as the triptych of panels would rotate or move stage right or left, they kept that iconic shape of Texas itself. The homey feeling of Sissy's living room made it feel like a 1970s suburban holdover. Bubba's Bar, with its neon sign and well-worn pool table scoreboard, evoked the popular town hangout. When it becomes the sterile and unwelcome office of Dr. Eve, these same wooden panels now evoke a sense of doom. By the end, as it turned into a church (with an unhelpful cross unwilling to be hung), only then did the panels really open, perhaps to "let in" all that had been held out before.

Encore! also saw SORDID LIVES as a teachable moment, pairing up with the Greater Orlando chapter of PFLAG to provide mentorship and support for LGBTQ youth in Central Florida. Outside the Pugh theatre, a table was set up with a few PFLAG Greater Orlando representatives there to speak to anyone during the pre-show, intermission, and post-show. Portions of the proceeds from SORDID LIVES this weekend will go to PFLAG to ensure a safe space for any conflicted LGBTQ youth and their families. As always, the folks at Encore! Performing Arts select stories that are timely, relevant, and needed to foster greater understanding and help with the local community that have patroned their work elsewhere. Coming on the heels of last year's "Don't Say Gay" bill, the arts have been threatened by intolerance and misunderstanding. And Encore! rises to the occasion to fight that intolerance, to re-teach that which has been misunderstood.

For all the grief that I've given SORDID LIVES throughout this review, I will not deny it the voice it's given to any and all LGBTQ patrons that might have felt seen in the performances. One may have struggled with a parent in denial. One may have carried on in an unspoken affair. One may have harbored an unrequited crush. SORDID LIVES, for all its faults, puts faces to these feelings. And Encore! Performing Arts makes us love them. They've taken the source material and made it accessible to a community that's been told it's better to stay silent than to speak. They've made characters relatable beyond their caricature through performances that elevate the written words. And, most importantly, they've done so with a winking nod and a laugh in the face of tragedy. Fun at a funeral has never been so cathartic.

SORDID LIVES runs for a limited time at Dr. Phillips Center's Alexis & Jim Pugh Theatre from February 16 through 18. Tickets can be acquired online or at the box office, pending availability. Photography by Tiffany Bagwell and Matthew Hiemenz, used with permission.

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