The Sacramento Bee (circulation 300,000)

"The question isn't 'When' - it's who

Co-workers find themselves on a retreat- and exposed"

 

THEATER REVIEW

When It Is, When It Isn't

***

By Robert A. Masullo

Bee Arts Critic

A title like "When It Is, When It Isn't" forces one to wonder: What's "it"?

As revealed in the new play by local playwright Paul Stewart, "it" is not any one thing but many of the concerns of people of the '90s, including sexual harassment, greed and personal acceptance.

"When" is Stewart's fifth play to be produced on a local stage. The son of popular local actress Bobby Stewart, he's best known for "Moments" (his first play) and the wacky comedy "The Trouble with Earthlings."

His latest effort is an engrossing sociological drama with more than a few comic overtones. A defective car radiator forces two men and two women - - to spend the night in an isolated cabin.

What ultimately comes out of the experience are personal truths that none really wanted to face.

Those ironically, are what the four were supposed to be seeking when they set out on the annual retreat organized by their employer, a real estate developer, at which workers are encouraged to bare their innermost thoughts about one another. The rarely, if ever achieved goal is greater productivity from the unencumbered employees.

In practice, however, most view these retreats as little more than boozy parties.

The quartet of Clark (Stephen Brewster), Rose (Julie Holmes), Larry (Dick Williams) and Melissa (Pamela Lourentzos, who is also the production's director) winds up having a mini-retreat of it's own, one that comes much closer to achieving the company event's objective.

Clark is the son of the firm's founder. On the surface, he is a happy-go-lucky near-playboy with greater interest in new female employees than in sales. Underneath, as verbal exchanges reveal, he is intimidated by his father and deathly afraid of making significant decisions (such as declaring his love for Melissa).

Rose is an ambitious, uneducated women who sends out mixed signals. Poor, pretty and pious, she a lethal mixture. Does she use physical attractiveness to aid her climb up the ladder? Of course. But does she have a choice? That is what she and the audience have to decide.

Larry, who is a generation older than Clark and Rose, also comes from a poor background. Though something of a leech and obnoxious is other ways, he has risen high in the firm because he is an excellent salesman. A superior memory and an ability to grovel before super-rich clients and bosses are the keys to his success. Again, questions arise about just how much choice he has had.

Melissa is a no-nonsense businesswoman. Turned off to men because of a bad marriage, she devotes her energies almost entirely to work. The other women in the firm, including Rose, regard her as cold and dictatorial, and a quasi-male. But she's not, as Rose and the rest of us learn.

These personality quirks boil...to produce an interesting stew. The players give satisfactory performances, though none sparkles. This one suspects reflects not on their abilities as much as on the structure of the play.

Stewart is an excellent writer with a fine ear for contemporary speech. He has, however, balanced each character's weaknesses and strengths so finely as to make it impossible for us to like - or fully dislike - any of them. This deprives the actors of springboards needed to fully show their dramatic skills and forces an unfortunate neutrality on the audience.

That said, however, the rewards of the work and production - the first non-musical staged by the Voice Fitness Institute - are numerous and make for a thought-provoking evening of theater.

 

ENCORE SUPPLEMENT

Local author Paul Stewart's latest play gives a thought provoking, occasionally funny look at modern problems such as sexual harassment, greed and personal acceptance via a forced overnight stay in a rural cabin of two men and two women employees of a real estate developer. Well-written, it captures contemporary speech beautifully. Journeyman-level acting plus a tad of fine singing.

 

 

 

 

 

The Suttertown News March 18, 1993

The Bee's 'Buttheads'

By Bill Madden

I really liked the Buttheads at the Bee - that is the Sacramento's Bee's Wintergarden Theater. I'm not talking about the buttheads who write for the Bee. The Buttheads whom, I refer to, were part of the one-act play, "The Trouble with Earthlings," that is presented FREE by the Midtown Transportation Players, many of whom work for the Bee. (Let's hope they still do after the play closes.)

The buttheads are inhabitants of the planet Airnotopia and have been designated to be in charge of the alien litigation and universal rescue operations.

Their Alien Refugee Court is trying the five survivors of the ecological holocaust that destroyed Earth. The Prosecutor (Steven Vargo), a butthead demands the death sentence, but his butthead counterpart, The Defender (Bobby Stewart), thinks otherwise.

The jury is a chorus of outerworld beings who love Earth's pop culture. They look like glazed-over versions of Oliver Hardy, Elvira, Harpo Marx, a cowboy, a Trekki, and a typical kid (reading an X-Men Comic Book.) They love singing old rock songs, especially those of Elvis, whom every extraterrestrial adores. The Bailiff (Graig Youngblood) is a giant creature with a menacing-looking weapon. There is no judge - jury and audience alike will determine the fate of the Earthlings.

The defendants include: An alcoholic (Richard Fehlman) who had been a hippie and, prior to that, a murdering member of the Viet Nam War; a baseball superstar (David Cameron) who makes millions on his product endorsements; a Conservationist (Gene Fuchs) who once knowingly parked in a handicapped zone; a secretary (Linda Sutcliffe) who was too shy to get involved in any causes; and a corporate officer (Katrina Clarke) who has sold out to Exxon.

The play is the product of a highly imaginative, local author named Paul Stewart...there are also, bits of genius that could be expanded. The humor at times is very good...Nice touches include having the jury enter while singing "Nothing's going to change my world." Yet the running joke of having them sing bits of one old song after another gets old. But don't eliminate it - change it.

Some of the good things included: the makeup of the extraterrestrial, especially the butt-foreheads (Tim Northon); the radio broadcast of the end of the Earth (Joe Nunziato); and many very funny lines which included slams at Elvis, Rush Limbaugh, drunks and Hillary Clinton and her husband.

The players gave performances that ranged from perfunctory to good. Director Robin Kidd should urge them to increase their pace and tempo, to be ready to adlib through any line problems, to develop a stronger sense of character and "play off" the other characters.

There are many things that need adjustment. The audience should be ushered to the front since they are used in the latter part of the play...

A friend who attended said the play was mercifully short (an hour), but then he usually leaves after the first act of anything.

Even with all its faults, it is funny. The audience laughed. I laughed. It's sloppy art, but it entertains.

 

 

 

THE TROUBLE WITH EARTHLINGS

By Steven Vanderville, Sarta Theatreletter:

 

One of the troubles with Earthlings is that they tend to talk louder than their actions. They realize, for example, that the necessity of their evolution means more dependence on things of their own creation rather than on natural resources: Earthlings may fully acknowledge that they are destroying their planet by writing limitlessly and raving endlessly about their own environmental follies - without actually doing anything to change their destructive course.

Another trouble with Earthlings is that they sometimes make sense.

Local playwright Paul Stewart has created an in-yer-face Eco scenario in his undeniable work "The Trouble with Earthlings" through the unique perspective not of doomed, egocentric inhabitants of Earth but of an alien race existing in a collapsed ecological atmosphere. The Airnotopians, as they are called, have been observing Earth for quite some time. At the last possible moment before the Earthlings literally blow up their own world the Airnotopians seize a handful of the careless beings and put them on trail for irresponsibility and self-genocide. The idea is not dissimilar to the pilot episode of "Star Trek: the Next Generation," where the deific Q decides quite spontaneously to hold the crew of the Enterprise NC17101-D accountable for the sins of the human race.

But the vehicle for Stewart's green message is not a metaphysical confrontation between man and God; rather, it is a "campy courtroom drama" which pits the wacky against the weird. Richard Fehlman is great as Bricker, a disoriented transient (with an inherent sense of subtle humor). Gene Fuchs played the perfectly thirty something, PC, sensitive-type Fishbird. Now you're getting the idea...the aliens nabbed the wrong people! Who, then, should they try for ruining the planet? That's exactly the idea that Stewart conveys inadvertently, that all humans should be held liable for the well-being of their world.

With this established, the comedy remains consistent throughout the show with topical bites. The Airnotopians point out that the end of the world means, of course, no more Rush Limbaugh. But then again, the left-wing savior Clinton is gone as well. "Yes," says Bobby Stewart as the Airnotopian Defender (the playwright's mom, no less). "And her husband died too." We learn that unprotected casual sex was OK...in the Seventies. Even Joey Butafucco is not spared the stab. The severely silly jury, though, is the central comedic foundation of the piece: imagine that half-a-dozen beings from an isolated moon, on which everyone sings and is obsessed with American television, won a lottery to be involved with the legal proceeding on a "civilized" world...I rest my case. Congratulations, finally to the Midtown Transportation Players, especially Tim Northon and Nancy Monger for their superb make-up work and of course to Paul Stewart for simply having such a vision. Their fist production is fully off the ground (all facets of the pun intended), and SARTA wishes them the best of luck.

Those Earthlings that make sense earn their own universal recognition.

 

 

 

 

THE MAGIC BOOK

(Sacramento production)

By Brent Hamilton

(Freelance and Western Film Festival critic)

The pirates are on the loose! That is live pirates from Treasure Island. In the wonderful world premier children's play "The Magic Book" characters literally walk out of the 200 year old Robert Lewis Stevenson novel.

Once on stage whom do these buccaneers raid and pillage? Why

Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Little Red Riding Hood, and characters from Grims Fairy tales, of course.

Carmichael playwright and set designer Paul Stewart has given us a frightfully realistic looking "magic" library full of books tall enough for a grown man to walk in and out of.

Last year The Voice Fitness Institute saw the production of his highly successful adult-themed play "When It Is, When It Isn't." Stewart, a freelance commercial artist who also works in video production seems to jump from project to project. If he weren't so busy he'd become a renaissance man.

"The Magic Book" is one show I strongly recommend for the whole family. Can you drag your kids away from the TV for one afternoon?

It all begins when very modern preteen twins Tina and Randy (skillfully played by Alexandra Widman and Jesse Davidson) fall asleep in their great grandmother's attic. The attic is a dusty old home library full of regular size books. The room and these works of classic literature date back to a time before TV and video games. When kids may have actually dared to read books on dark rainy days.

The twins wake up, pull the covers off their beds and find they've become giant hardback books. The walls are no longer rows of regular size books, but six foot high novels that are actually doors into other worlds of fiction.

You realize there is a problem when Tom Sawyer (brilliantly played by Tor Tarantola) steps out of the orphanage scene in Oliver Twist. As the book opens we hear "please sir may I have some more."

This Tom Sawyer may look 12 but he's really well over 100. No longer the irresponsible prankster, he's now head clerk of the "Grand Central Library." He greets the twins and explains to them that anyone from the "real world" is welcome in the library if they use their imaginations and develop a love for classic literature.

What do these characters do between chapters? They "book leap" which means they visit other stories and make friends. All is not well however, it seems Long John Silver and his gang have kidnapped the head librarian and stolen her magic book.

The pirates have brain washed an assortment of characters into joining them. This explains why Heide and Goldilocks enter looking and talking like trailer trash. Various characters from Mother Goose have added pirate accessories to their wardrobes.

Tina and Randy realize it is all just a dream, (parts of the attic are still visible, the window and a few pieces of furniture.)

But they become scared when no one down stairs hears their screams after a six foot four 300 pound Long John Silver enters and breaths on them. Aaron M. Harmon is just plain excellent as the classic Long John. From his ancient English sailor accent to his wooden leg limp. Also very convincing was Ray Lankford as his sidekick.

The production makes full use of 21 children, a few teenagers and

a few near babies. Only two full sized adults lead the team of brain washed kids and menace the still innocent ones, this convention works quite effectively.

Some of these child actors were champs; others appear to have had little or no stage experience. In scenes of all-out chaos kids running around aimlessly works. Such as the hysterical bit where a stream of kids are chased by the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasimoto exits one book then magically appears a second later walking through another book 30 feet away! This was achieved by real life identical twins Josh and Joe Dennis.

Stewart has written a great play that is funny and easy to understand, not to mention down right educational without being preachy. However, there are some slightly complicated plot elements, how else can we travel to an attic in New Jersey, to a magic library, rescue a librarian (trapped in the Jungle Book) and back again?

In order to make the show work during crucial scenes, there can not be distracting elements. Simply put, too many kids are on stage looking lost too often.

The direction was lapse and seemed almost nonexistent at times, particularly during the sword fight scenes. One guesses this may also have to do with limited rehearsal time.

The only other adult in the cast is veteran local actress, Bobby Stewart as Mary Ann the head Librarian, who also doubles as the twin's great-grand mother.

She does a wonderful job going from caring mother figure to stone cold no-nonsense stereotypical never-married school marm. It turns out the actress is the mother of the playwright.

Not to give the plot away, but the show ends with the twins saving the world of literature and putting the story lines and the characters back in their original order. At least that's what we think until...

The show also contains a few song and dance numbers, a couple fits in very well. Gerald Rheault's original piano tunes were quite catchy. Jill Widman's choreography was first rate. The show runs less than an hour and a half, is Stewart planning to make it an all out musical next?

Go see the show and drop by the library with your kids afterward. To quote a lyric during the pirate rap number "this ain't Mother Goose, this ain't Dr. Seuss, we're going to the real world and we're gonna cut lose!"

 

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