Outstanding Debut winners from the 2006 Artie Awards

The Artie Award nominations, recognizing outstanding accomplishment among Buffalo’s theaters, will be published in Artvoice next issue. Nominees will be listed in 19 acting, directing and design categories, as well as for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Musical of the season. In addition, Katharine Cornell Awards for outstanding contributions by visiting artists, Citations for special accomplishments, and a Career Achievement Award will be announced.

The awards themselves will be presented at the Town Ballroom, 681 Main Street on Monday, June 4 at 8 pm. The doors will open at 7:30 with Artie winner Jimmy Janowski scanning the crowd for this year’s best-dressed on the red carpet, and jazz vocalist Peggy Farrell on the main stage. The Arties are a benefit for Benedict House, which provides residential services for individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

HURLYBURLY

Populated with characters who are entirely without redemptive qualities, David Rabe’s play, Hurlyburly, is set in Hollywood of the 1980s, a world of instant gratification and greed, with generous doses of recreational drugs and sex helping that agenda along. A group of male friends congregate in an apartment to drink, argue and share women. Before we are through, we’ve experienced tragic loss and a hollow facsimile of redemption. When it is working, in its own perverse way, it’s pretty wonderful.

Mind you, it took me a while to forgive the Trajicom production for a first act with problems. I always like David Autovino, but there he was, channeling some voice like Al Pacino as interpreted by Mel Blanc, and I was finding it hard to watch. This did not bode well for a play that clocks in at three hours, and which has a second act notoriously more daunting than the first.

Granted, this was a preview before an opening the next day, and some of the choices that turned the first act of Hurlyburly into just plain Mish Mash, may have evened out with playing by now. Even on that preview night, as Act II began to click away and a uniform playing style began to emerge, it was possible to settle down into the grimy aesthetics of the thing. Autovino did, occasionally, manage to lose the voice and, in his defense, he does have a yeoman’s task in navigating the role of Eddie, the unlikely and unlikable protagonist, a Hollywood casting agent who doesn’t see how anybody else’s problems, needs, or independent existence pertains to him.

Billed as a “black comedy,” many of the play’s laughs in Hurlyburly derive from the unmitigated odiousness of the characters. Example: big laugh when the woman who, we learn, has previously fellated a movie star in a car while her young child watched, stumbles back into the apartment to announce that Phil, their actor buddy with anger issues, has pushed her out of her own car—while it was moving. Or, there is the big laugh when Eddie equates his girlfriend’s inability to decide between French and Chinese food with her ambivalent affections for himself and his roommate, and to her decision to abort a pregnancy when she could not be sure of the paternity.

Yes, it’s perverse. It’s also very funny.

Director Christopher Standart has assembled an able crew. Michael Votta is Phil, the misogynistic actor with anger management issues. Peter Jaskowiak is the misogynistic Hollywood wannabe. Andy Moss is Eddie’s charismatic jerk of a roommate. Kara Gabrielle McKenney plays Eddie’s culinarily ambiguous girlfriend. Linda Stein is especially effective as the party girl who gets tossed from the car. Kelly Jakiel gives a polished performance as the runaway sexual care package. By play’s conclusion, even Mr. Autovino was redeemed as an actor, if not as a character. The show has been extended through May 26 at the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle, 612 Fillmore Avenue, (553-0073).

SORDID LIVES

While we are on the subject of guilty pleasures, Buffalo United Artists’ production of Del Shores’ comedy, Sordid Lives, is a study in camp comedy. The show, about a Southern family planning a funeral, plays, as the company eagerly concedes, like “a very special episode of Mama’s Family.” To some, this would hardly seem like a recommendation. There are, one could argue, two kinds of people: those who find southern-white-trash-comedy hilarious, and those who find it toxic.

You know which group you’re in.

If you still laugh at the memory of Carol Burnett’s portrayal of Eunice, line up for a ticket. Indeed, the evening plays along in the spirit of the old Carol Burnett Show. Some of Buffalo’s most seasoned comic actors latch onto a crew of stock characters and ride them roughshod into hilarity. Like the Carol Burnett Show, an under-current of bemused detachment, even amateurishness prevails. On the opening the actors wantonly milked a momentary lapse in memory in order to harvest the extra laughs. Ditto for a prop brassiere that obliged a character with two wooden legs to hobble from the stage to retrieve it. (The moment was reminiscent of the opening performance of BUA’s Ruthless, several years ago, at which a prop gun slid across the stage at the climactic moment, obliging actor Jimmy Janowski—in drag—to ask child actress Becky Lord to retrieve it—much to the delight of the audience.)

The spirit is free-wheeling and spontaneous, and is designed to facilitate unbridled laughter. Beneath it all, however, is a subversive spirit in which the camp sensibility serves a Brechtian function, distancing us, in safe ways, from brutal social realities. In the case of Sordid Lives, those realities are the ways in which families brutalize even those they love.

Del Shores is also the author of Southern Baptist Sissies. Sordid Lives is an earlier effort and lacks the solid construction of the later play. Here, we see a series of comic sketches pieced together, and while there is enough comic brilliance therein to have attracted great interest in the playwright (and to result in a west coast hit and a film version), the stage version does require a bit of indulgence. Still, this earnest production, under the direction of Chris Kelly, a master of the genre, goes down very easily.

Marc Sacco plays Ty, the gay son deciding whether to go home for grandma’s funeral.

Jimmy Janowski plays “Brother Boy,” the gay uncle who has been confined to an insane asylum for his entire adult life, by the deceased, because he is gay and a cross-dresser. His performance is sublime, and he has costumes to match.

Anne Hartley Pfohl plays the sister of the deceased, who never would have quit smokin’ if she’d knowed sister was gonna die! Fear not, she gets the obligatory screaming scene.

Kerrykate Abel deftly plays the spouse of the cheating husband whose casually stored wooden legs cause “Sister’s” untimely demise.

Caitlin Coleman, who makes a specialty of off-kilter southern characters, plays the uptight sister, concerned only for social appearances. Mary McMahon is the official bad-influence of the family; for the role she has transformed herself into an Al Capp cartoon, and she wastes not one of her snappy one-liners.

Timothy Finnegan, Mary Moebius, Eric Rawski and Brian Riggs round out the sordid little community with a bevy of stereotypes, all too familiar beneath their exaggerations. The production would be a most appropriate way to commemorate the loss of Jerry Falwell. The production continues through June 2 at Alleyway Theatre, One Curtain Up Alley, (886-9239).