'Pop Justice' a made-for-TV murder

By Darby Saxbe

Ultimately, the play's strengths and weaknesses could be summed up in regards to its small-screened inspiration. Like a sitcom, Pop Justice features exaggerated characters, a barely believable plot, and punchline-oriented scripting. However, the play is also refreshingly short and snappy, with a clever setup that makes for a pleasant diversion even if not a revelatory night of theater.

Patrick McGarvey /YH Candace Rand, BK '98, participates in the trailer park trial of the century.

Pop Justice begins in L.A. Law mode: two bright young lawyers, the emphatic Foster (Breen Sullivan, DC '01) and the sleazeball Hibbs (David Tittle, MC '99) discuss a recent murder case. The woman responsible, Penni (Candace Rand, BK '98), has already confessed to shooting her boyfriend Jimmy (Manny Caixeiro BR '00), so the case seems cut and dried. However, Foster insists that she and Hibbs can construct a plausible defense for Penni--while embarrassing the District Attorney and pleasing their boss in the process. A reluctant Penni is dragged in for consultation, and a series of over-the-top confessions and skillful manipulations ensue. Through leading questions and direct suggestions, Foster manages to convince Penni that her parents exploited her and that Jimmy started a fire that killed her family. Ultimately, Penni is left convinced by Foster's rhetoric, and devastated by its implications. The lawyers congratulate themselves that they will be able to mount a successful case, conveniently forgetting the life that they have destroyed in the process.

As played by Rand, for whom the play is a senior project in the Theater Studies major, Penni is a white-trash waitress who is, initially, curiously unrepentant about the shooting. As she describes it (in a clever flashback that has her reenact the crime), she just "got sick" of beer-swilling Jimmy, who wears a smelly plaid shirt and blocks the driveway with his truck.

Shrill Penni and truckdriver Jimmy are a pair of working-class caricatures, stone-washed jeans and all. Appropriately, Foster and Hibbs are stereotypical lawyers. Tittle's Hibbs, who spends most of his time on stage smirking and making passes at Foster, aspires to be a smooth operator, and meets with little success. He and Foster interact like Slater and Jessie on Saved by the Bell: he's dumb and amorous, she's clever and castrating. Foster does lots of shouting and pacing, which makes it hard for the audience to believe that she's as skillful a manipulator as the script purports her to be.

However, all of the actors are engaging and convincing despite a script that accords their characters little dimension. Rand deserves special praise for her adept handling of a role that requires her to swerve from one extreme emotion to another.

Pop Justice has its flaws, most of which stem from a script that piles on too many bizarre revelations to be believed. At the end of the play, the viewer ought to be enraged at the callousness of Foster and Hibbs and their readiness to manipulate the truth for their own personal gain. However, it's hard to feel indignant about the exploitation of Penni, a woman who kills her boyfriend because he gets on her nerves. Penni's transformation from brassy gun-slinging killer to utterly impressionable victim is also hard to swallow.

Such complaints aside, however, Pop Justice makes for an entertaining half-hour of theater. It's short and unpretentious, and fun. On a campus which is rampant with instances of long-winded theatrical pretension, sometimes a dash of well-executed sitcom humor is a nice surprise.

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