"It's an ageless, sexless, mindless, less, less -- less of everything show," were the words that started off last Saturday's Spotlighters Theater's production of Avery Crozier's Eat the Runt, a play that proves, if nothing else, that America's obsession with "voting someone off the island" has even found its way onto the stage.
The premise of Crozier's play is simple: a job applicant for a grants manager position is flown in from out of state for a series of interviews. The interviewee, Merrit, who was skillfully portrayed this past Saturday by Kate Briggman (who performed in Hopkins' 2003 production of The Vagina Monologues), is whisked from office to office, and boss to boss, in semi-improvised scenes which border on the offensive, and often crosses boldly into the bizarre. It would seem simple enough.
But there's a twist. At the beginning of every performance, the audience decides which actor or actress they want to play which role. This means, according to the press junket, that for every showing there are 40,320 possible combinations. The play itself is written with this dexterity in mind; all the character names are androgynous, as in Merrit the interviewee, Pinky the museum director, or Sidney the museum trustee. The play is entirely without pronouns, and the situations in which Merrit finds herself, though at times full of sexual tension, never rely solely on the characters' genders, though with the audience selecting roles, they often have to do with sexuality.
In the end though, a clever ruse isn't enough to keep the whole show afloat. While Crozier's play tactfully avoids creating single sex roles, it falls short of elevating this concept to anything more meaningful than wit. The content of Merrit's interviews, though sequentially connected, often have little to do with one another, and the play shifted just as quickly from art, artists and curators, to conversations on anal hemorrhoids and Jesus on the crucifix.
The play did, at least, deliver on its promise. By the second act it was less engrossing and less amusing. The freshness of the racy scenes and scandalous vocabulary had played itself out, and all that was left was the monotony of a bad joke that didn't seem to end soon enough. Still, the play finished on a high note, with an ending that tipped its hat to Wilde's social dramas and the qualms of gender and identity confusion. If anything, the best review of the play was obvious in the audience's reaction when the play stopped. No one was quite sure if it was finished or not.
With no real narrative thread, the play rested on the novelty of its individual scenes, and many of these delivered brilliantly. Robert Alleman, a Hopkins alum who was acting in his first Spotlight Production, nicely underplayed Sydney, the nervous and babbling museum trustee, and Elaina Telitsina, though at times a little too involved in the absurdity of her character, played off the actors with skill. While at times the dialogue broke down and personas seemed to dissolve, the actors were generally convincing and the play enjoyable to watch.
Eat the Runt runs through Oct. 2 at the Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theater, 817 St. Paul St.
