Charleston (m.) Times-Courier

Eastern's Theatre Department Ii Eastern Illinois University's

Theatre Department has just con­cluded a week of one-acts in the Studio Theatre as part of their ad-anced-student directing projects rogram. The week began with five

performances of David Mamet's "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," di­rected by S. Laurel Cope, and Harold Pinter's "A Slight Ache," di­rected by Geoff Cowgill, and ended with four performances of Sam Shephard's "Fool for Love," di­rected by Jacob Gent, and Joe Or­ton's "Funeral Games," directed by John Rourke.

"Sexual Perversity in Chicago," which introduced Mamet to New York audiences in 1975, is about Danny and Deborah, swinging Chicago singles who meet in a bar and are soon living together. The fragile relationship, however, is sabotaged by the bad-mouthing of their respective same-sex best friends, Bernard and Joan, and eventually destroyed by their in­ability to cope with the small an­noyances and accommodations of their shared daily life. Deborah moves back in with Joan, who gives her a brief, bitchy lecture, and Danny and Bernard are back on the beach, ogling the girls and engaging in macho "pickup chat­ter."

It's done as a string of quick blackout sketches, and it's written with insight and Mamet's usual keen ear for dialogue.

The Eastern production was set in the present, though the play it­self comes across now as an amus­ing historical view of mating ritu­als of this pre-AIDS era. The pac­ing was leisurely, and the scene changes for the various moves through bars, offices, dwellings, the beach and a school proved somewhat cumbersome, but direc­tor Cope got good performances from her cast - D. Patrick Swearingen and Jennifer Givens as Danny and Deborah, Matthew W. Goines as the beer-bellied crude Bernard (though a little too mush­mouthed), and especially Kather­ine Slovinski as the frustrated, man-hating school teacher Joan (she can do more with a word than many actors can with a whole sen­tence).

Enigmatic threats to the safety of c~aracters are a feature of many of Harold Pinter's plays. "A Slight Ache," first broadcast on BBC in 1959, then staged in London in 1961 and in New York in 1962, was the first Pinter play in which the menace, although apparently com­ing from without, it abetted by the personalities of the characters themselves.

A mysterious old match-seller lurks outside the country house of a middle-aged married couple. He is invited inside by the wife, but re­mains silent throughout, even when directly questioned. His ,presence exacerbates the tensions between the couple and eventually leads to the disintegration of the husband and his replacement in the eyes of the wife by the old man.

It's an interesting but some­what static piece which, aside from ,occasional exchanges between the 'Jtusband and wife, consists largely oflong monologues directed at the silent stranger by one or the other.

David Plug and Jennifer Shields did well as the husband and wife, despite their attempts at sounding very British. Fortunately, their ac­cents came and went, and went more often than they came. The match-seller was played by Amell McClear.

In Pinter's plays, the silences between and beneath utterances are almost as essential an ingredi­ent as the utterances themselves. Pinter has said that there are "two silences: one when no word is spo­ken, the other when perhaps a tor­rent of language is being em­ployed." Under Cowgill's direction, we were given the torrent of lan­guage is being employed," in some of the husband's monologues, but rarely the speechless silences.

Both plays - "Sexual Perver­sity" and "A Slight Ache" - were eminently worth doing, but not necessarily the same evening on the same bill. Each ran an hour or so, and the audience the nightl was there was getting restless about midway through theone-sided talk of the Pinter play.

For someone who's been dead 27 years, Joe Orton is going strong in­deed. As his biographer, John Lahr, put it, "Orton expected to die young, but built his plays to last."

"Funeral Games," a TV play first produced by Yorkshire Televi­sionin 1968, then staged in London in 1970 and in New York in 1973, is a wildly absurd satire of religious pretentiousness.

The convoluted plot involves Pringle, a self-styled Bishop of the Brotherhood, a religious commu­nity apparently created to satisfy his own voracious sexual appetite, who hires a private eye and nude model named Caulfield to investi­gate his wife Tessa's supposed infi­delity. She is a health visitor pro­viding private care for McCorquo­dale, a one-time Catholic priest and convert to the Brotherhood, who was excommunicated when

he discovered Pringle engaging in hanky-panky with his (McCorquo­dale's) wife during supposedly spiritual rites.

Pringle, claiming that a vision of the Lord came to him, command­ing "Thou shalt not suffer an adul­teress to live," decides his wife Tessa must die, but instead of ac­tually killing her, persuades her to acquiesce in the spreading of a ru­mor that he has in fact done her in, which will give him a reputation as ajust and fearless Christian.

The play calls for a certain amount ofhigh camp, declamation and attitudinizing (as in Gilbert and Sullivan or Wilde). Instead, the Eastern production tended to stress the sitcom aspects of the play, and the actors often raced their lines, so that much of the wit and bite got lost. And again, as in the Pinter, the actors started out trying to sound very British, but fortunately that didn't last long. They could take a leaf from the Charleston Alley Theatre, which has managed to do productions -all respectable and some quite good - of works by Chekhov, Jean Gi­raudoux and Noel Coward, and most recently "The Best of Friends," based on some of George Bernard Shaw's correspondence, without once trying to sound Russ­ian, French or British.

J. Jason Winfield played Caulfield; Chris Williams, Pringle;

nment I

shes four one-acts competently

Carl Lebovitz

Lebovitz is reviewer-at­large for the

Journal Gazette and Tirnes­

Courier.

Novotny, Tessa; Richard inski, McCorquodale; and

Pomeroy, a policeman. Shepard's "Fool for Love, "which

. at the Magic Theatre of Francisco in 1982 and came to York's Circle Repertory The­a year later, under the au­direction, is set in a rundown room on the edge of the Mo­

Desert. Eddie, a rodeo bum and stunt

man, has driven over 2,000 miles to renew an affair with an old flame, May, and take her back with him to Wyoming. May won't budge, how­ever. It seems Eddie has dumped her a number of times for new ro­mances, and he's carrying on right now with a rich woman whom May calls the "countess." May and Ed­die enter into a series of violent con­frontations, alternatively ready to love or to destroy each other. Like the brothers in "True West," they can't live with or without each

other. There's a mysterious old man

here, too, sitting in a chair, looking more dead than alive, but with enough life left in him to comment occasionally and take a swig from a glass ofwhiskey.

Enter Martin, who has come to take May to a movie. Eddie tells him that his father leda double life, with two separate families, and that May is his half-sister and they started "fooling around" 15 years ago before they knew they were re­lated.

Is Eddie telling the truth or putting Martin on? At one point, after all, the old man, who is pre­sumably the father, says Eddie is a "fantasist," whereas he himselfis a realist. Pointing to a nonexistent picture on a blank wall, he re­marks, "That's realism."

This fine line between reality and illusion, plus the love-hate re­lationship, possibly incestuous, be­tween Eddie and May and the cat­and-mouse game he plays with Martin, makes "Fool for Love" fas­cinating theatre. I The Eastern production may

not have achieved the "relent­lessly" high level of intensity de­sired by the author (in Shepard'p own staging, for example, the doors were equipped with drums con­cealed in the frames, with ampli­fiers, to exaggerate and prolong the

. sound of slamming doors), but, in general, I think he would have been happy with Gent's direction , Sue Palchak's credible portrayal ef May, and Brad Pugh's strong per­formance as Eddie, which was eas­ily the best acting of the serief? Clint Vrona made a good foil a:s Martin, and D. Patrick Swearin-gen was the old man. :

The scenery design for all (orlr productions was by Stephen R. Carmody, the costume design/exEl­cution by Amy L. Sherwood, the sound design by Carmody anU David Plug, and the lighting de­sign/execution by Brandon Hoene (under the supervision of Davip Wolski). Mark Friedman was the technical director. '

A word or two in the progra~ notes about the setting for each Qf the plays would have been help­ful.