A fast-paced obstacle course in a small Texas town

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Texas strangers Michael Walker, DC '01, and Ari Shapiro, DC '00, after costume change No. 8.

No one pretends that an 'N-Sync album is about quality performance. An 'N-Sync album is more about production: the quality and craftsmanship are not nearly as important to 10 year-old girls as the process of screaming loudly, buying teen magazines, and hanging slimy, clear-skinned hotties on their walls.

Like an 'N-Sync album, Greater Tuna is a play more about the game of theatricality than the quality of performance. With two actors playing an array of Southwest yokels in a series of manic costume changes, the play is an elaborate, ridiculous game--like the fantastic obstacle courses little kids invent which don't actually pose a single physical challenge. The goal is not great drama, or even great acting. The goal is to enjoy the game: to highlight the very idea of role-playing and to stretch theatricality to its limits.

Unfortunately, the production going up this weekend in Nick Chapel, produced by the Berkeley Sudler Fund, ignores this game in favor of inexplicable and insupportable attempts at realism. Rather than embrace the impossibility of such an approach, actors Ari Shapiro, DC '00, and Michael Walker, DC '01, and director Thomas Pearson, BK '01, try to suppress the play's ridiculous elements by introducing a level of performance the play is not meant to accommodate. Rather than milk the costume changes for all they're worth, the creative team tries to hide them, apparently hoping we'll forget that the reason they keep running offstage is to put on new wigs. We're not fooled; we're wondering why we're not let in on the game. All the approach really leads to are large blocks of dead time that can at best be called stalling.

It's not just in the costume changes that this production's basic ideology self-destructs. The conceit of Greater Tuna is a day in the life of Tuna, Tex., the kind of town even Hank Hill avoids like a rattlesnake. We begin and end with Thurston Wheeler (Shapiro) and Arles Struvie (Walker) on the air at radio station OKKK. (The call letters hint at a dark underbelly the play does not even dream of developing.) The radio concept is meant to give these actors an excuse to play exclusively to each other; there is no camera watching them, so they are free to begin concocting the comic chemistry meant to be the backbone of the play. Why, then, do Shapiro and Walker mug unrelentingly for the audience? They pay so little attention to one another that they seem unsure of when to interrupt or react to each other's lines. By sabotaging the necessary build-ups and overlaps in the dialogue, they made me wonder if I was mistaken and OKKK was actually a TV station.

The tragedy of such a misbegotten approach to the script is that Shapiro and Walker are fine and funny individual actors. Shapiro comes closest to finding the play's gaminess, showing his strength in outrageous female characters like Aunt Pearl Beumiller, who walks like a chicken and enjoys poisoning neighborhood dogs with strychnine-filled biscuits--"bitter pills," as she coos in her old, broken, Southern drawl. Walker's strength is his rubbery facial expressions, which manage to be instantly pliable but also immutable as stone. Both actors would do better to infuse all their characterizations with these qualities. Shapiro's attempts at understatement wilt (his Reverend Spikes could use an injection of Aunt Pearl's nuttiness), while Walker resorts to relentless upstaging when he can't quite nail his character's "look." The best scenes are between Shapiro's Beumiller and Walker's Stanley, her delinquent nephew, with Walker at his most understated and Shapiro at his most outrageous.

Another strength in the production is some undeniably dead-on humor. When the actors describe Tuna's first "multi-ethnic" little theater production (My Fair Lady set in Polynesia); when Bertha Beumiller and her daughter commiserate about cheerleading tryouts; when Shapiro takes the stage as Elmer Watkins, a red-blooded hunting man committed to making the world "a better place...for the right kind of people"--these are the moments that successfully emphasize the play's inanity, but the actors can't help but fall into the script's messy rhythm.

Shapiro and Walker are eager to draw out a subtextual condemnation of narrow-minded small-town mores, but this is a subtext the play itself hardly supports. The play is meant to be a very simple game. This is not to say it is easy. The great Charles Ludlam built a career and a following on such costume-change farces. (His Irma Vep is currently being revived by the company he created, New York's Ridiculous Theater Company.) But the theatricality is to be found in the gaminess, in the construction of the piece itself. These actors' eagerness to make it all mean something is appealing but misplaced. We want them to play, not to pretend. We want the obstacle course to be as preposterous as possible without any pretense that there's an actual physical benefit to the exercise.

Shapiro and Walker would have been better served by a director who encouraged them to play off each other and each other's costume changes. Instead, they ignore the script's self-conscious theatricality in favor of a broad, audience-directed commentary which doesn't exist in the script. Like 'N-Sync, they succeed in presenting an evening of painless entertainment. Unlike 'N-Sync, however, they are outwitted by their own attempts to present something more.

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