REVIEW: Rep Stage's FULLY COMMITTED with Reservations

Fully Committed at Rep Stage (Equity theatre) does everything right – it has assembled the right design team, directorial staff and cast.  What is wrong here is the play itself.  Clocking in at 100 intermissionless minutes that feels like at least double that, Becky Mode's first play is really a one joke, one gimmick comedy.  Perhaps better suited as a 15 minute sketch on MadTV or SNL, the show takes us into the underground (literally) workings of a swank New York City restaurant, more specifically the reservation room where we find Sam, an out of work actor (surprise, surprise) manning the phones and doing the work of two people.  His co-worker is gone for the day, and Sam must work all the lines and keep the entire staff of the place happily at bay.  This is a day in Sam's life.  And that is pretty much it.

 

Set designer Daniel Ettinger has really brought his A game to the table.  Presented in the Theatre Outback, a black box that may have once started life as a storage closet, nothing about it seems small or cramped.  Talk about making the most out of a small space!  The meticulously designed and decorated basement offers a surprising amount of playing space and levels, including allowing the actor to enter as if coming down stairs.  Jen Hooper (properties) also deserves much credit here – her attention to detail is magnificent.  I don't envy her for what must be a monumental task in resetting everything for the next performance.  The mother lode of the tech work here is in the obviously capable hands of sound operator Danny Collins and production stage manager Cambra Overend.  There are probably a thousand cues to call and execute, often timed to the slight hand movements of the actor, and from no less than three phones sometimes all ringing at once.  They, too, have really stepped up to the plate here.

 

Director Susan Kramer has done the near impossible.  She has turned a tiny set into several locations, sometimes more than one at a time, and has kept the action interesting, when in reality, Sam would likely spend this busy day planted behind his desk.  Kramer has more than succeeded here – her direction is focused and visually interesting.

 

Most importantly, the one man in a one-man show must really be on top of things.  Making his Rep Stage debut, and recently named its artistic director/producer, Michael Stebbins has set the bar high for all future members of the company.  Billed as a tour-de-force for an actor, the role of Sam is really only one of roughly forty portrayed here with mostly razor sharp definition by Stebbins.  In what may be a fault of the script, he relies sometimes on the cliché (and potentially offensive) with stereotypical voices of a Mexican, a Frenchman, a Pakistani/Indian, and Asian and effete gay man or two.  But mostly, he provides a wide array of characterizations (he may wish to pursue a career in the lucrative cartoon voiceover industry) – sometimes sweet and endearing (Sam's dad, who might be a refugee from the film Fargo), sometimes funny (the dead-on socialite Bunny Van de Veer), and sometimes appropriately annoying (the amped-up personal assistant to Naomi Campbell, Bryce).  And his way to each character also varies nicely, with sometimes just a change in facial expression, or a slight change in walk or movement.  There is always a change in voice, and here is where he gets into a little trouble – some of the voices sound suspiciously similar.

 

Kramer and Stebbins must also share a little of the blame for occasional over-playing when being more subtle might have worked better.  For example, when portraying an increasingly frenzied front of house staff, one doubts that the volume, tone and histrionic gesturing on display would have ever taken place in front of waiting patrons; ducking behind the hostess podium wouldn't really work more than once without raising a Botoxed eyebrow or two).  No, in such an elite place, discretion means never letting 'em see you sweat.  Speaking of sweat, by about thirty minutes in, Mr. Stebbins has worked himself into a visible lather.  It was hard not to offer the man a towel.  Of course, it is only natural that he would perspire from running, jumping and rolling all over the set, flailing his elastic body and doing his best cross-eyed Jerry Lewis facial and vocal contortions.  It may just be me – I'm not a huge fan of Jerry Lewis – but nothing about this play suggests that Stebbins should have to work this hard.

 

No, the fault in this nearly faultless production lies with the script.  We get it already!  Not surprisingly, the phone never stops ringing, the chef is a pompous ass, the hostess is an airhead, the French head waiter is moody, the rich and famous are outrageously demanding and all out-of-towners are rubes.  The first five or six phone calls covered that old, obvious territory.  The rest is just filler, including two clichéd subplots – one involving Sam's recently widowed dad, about to spend his first Christmas alone, the other involving Sam's acting career.  It says a lot when the cleverest plot twist concerns a clean up in the ladies room after an elderly patron has missed the toilet.  I'm not kidding.

 

Fully Committeds will likely be springing up everywhere, as one set, one actor plays must be cheap to produce.  But I doubt any of them will be given the first-rate treatment that Rep Stage has.  I suppose that to the people who actually do Sam's job or work in a posh Manhattan eatery, this play is a scream.  But for the rest of us, it provides only the occasional chuckle.  Like Sam's job must really be, this play is mostly tedious. 

To post a comment, you must register and login.