Houston Press: “tempOdyssey is one wild and crazy ride”

tempOdyssey

tempOdyssey is one wild and crazy ride

By D.L. Groover

Published on August 23, 2007

Life is a temp job.

Just ask Genny (Amy Hopper), the heroine, of sorts, of Dan Dietz’s phantasmagoric, coruscating tempOdyssey, on view for all-too-short a run through Nova Arts Project. “In the office, but not of the office,” she says proudly. She’s a little too peppy, and a little off. While explaining her love of the anonymity that temping provides — her armor against the world — she casually drops what will become her mantra throughout her one very bad day: “It wasn’t me, blame it on the black hole.” As she stands babbling to us about how she got to Seattle from her home in Appalachia, scientific equations zoom by and disappear into the distance, as if pulled into their own black hole, and silhouettes of scientists in white lab coats arrange the sparse pieces of set — triangular hulks of cogs and pipes — behind her. Among them is a giant chicken. And this is just the beginning of Genny’s odd, surreal long day’s journey. Like Genny, who says she’s got a hook in her heart, we, too, are hooked immediately.

Playwright Dietz never lets up, and this dreamy work is the most original in many a season. I think this is his first play to appear in Houston, and it’s about time. If tempOdyssey is a harbinger of what his work is like, bring it on! The most distinctive theater voice since Harry Kondoleon, his is a refreshing collage of contempo speak and bold, bald poetry — Williams without swoon, O’Neill without pomp.

Genny temps for the mysterious Ithaca Techno Solutions (the one open reference to Homer’s Odyssey — Ithaca being the homeland hero Odysseus longs to return to). It’s her first day on the job, and Last Day Girl (Jenni Rebecca Stephenson) is ecstatic that she’s out of there, brushing off any office callers with a string of fuck-you’s as she quickly lists Genny’s slave duties: Never leave your desk, bathroom break twice a day, lunch at three and never, ever, serve a drink without a coaster! Then, poof, she’s out the door. This office comedy plays like an absurdist No Exit-version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, what with Nepotism Guy (Paul Salazar) screaming about a broken pencil and luring Genny to “see my inbox,” and office confrere, temp Dead Body Boy (Bernardo Cubria), telling Genny tales of what really goes on inside Ithaca. But Dietz has more, much more, to show and tell.

We’re whisked into Genny’s nightmarish childhood on a hardscrabble Appalachian farm outside Atlanta. The waterfall on the backdrop flows blood-red. Genny’s an expert “chicken choker,” able to kill chickens instantly without pain, which explains the giant fowl stalking the play. She’s her own goddess of death, and her daddy (Seán Patrick Judge) sees his profits skyrocket with the ­tender-tasting fresh kill. But even goddesses have their Achilles’ heel, and Genny’s soft white hands are doomed. Get too close to her and you’re dead, and all by way of the throat, be it cancer, a suicidal hanging or whiplash.

Genny’s got to temp so she can keep moving. When Dead Body Boy gets too close — first a touch, then a kiss — he’s toast, too. But in Dietz’s magical, powerful world, he becomes Genny’s conscience, rising from the dead as he frantically wraps packing tape around his neck to support his head from flopping over. Genny has discovered what Ithaca’s madmen are up to, and she holds the key to the universe in her little temp hands. She’s going to blow up the building and probably half of Seattle with it. At the debatable happy ending, Genny’s place in the universe is secure as she faces her fate on her own.

The simple yet radiant Nova Arts production owes much to the pinpoint accuracy of director Clinton Hopper (husband of Amy) and his dazzling actors. Amy Hopper is all country-eyed wonder at life, caught up in her crazy-quilt inner world, a dream within a dream. She is, at once, innocent and mythic avenger. Cubria, as Dead Body Boy, is downright brilliant, whether playing sad-sack temp or the resurrected Cassandra-type, and Paul Salazar is all quirks and spaz as Nepotism Guy. Judge plays bumpkin Daddy straight, which brings out the pathos, even while Mama (Jenni Rebecca Stephenson) wrestles the sun to knock it off the pine limb so it can set. (This bizarre theatrical non sequitur is one of many that Dietz sprinkles throughout like stardust.) Another frightening crazy is Salvador Chevez’s Scientist, the ultimate absentminded professor. Experimenting with deadly force beyond his control, he’s so giddy when relating the quirks and quarks in Big Bang theory, he gets his hands all twisted up in his lab coat pockets.

The marvelous swooping projections by Antonio Aguries III, the colorful, atmospheric lighting by Sarah Lazorwitz and the minimal setting imaginatively rendered by Bryan White all contribute to make temp­Odyssey by far the most thought-provoking show in Houston. I doubt it will be eclipsed any time soon.

tempOdyssey

Houston Chronicle: Nova Arts’ tempOdyssey a strange and funny trip

August 17, 2007

Nova Arts’ tempOdyssey a strange and funny trip

By EVERETT EVANS
Houston Chronicle
TempOdyssey begins as the strangest comedy you’ve ever seen about temp hell, and then evolves into something stranger still: the surreal saga of a woman desperate to escape her perceived fate as a bringer of death.

Lest that make Nova Arts Projects’ current outing sound too grim, the play is wildly original, often funny and arguably the freshest thing offered by any Houston theater this summer.

Nova Arts is doing Houston audiences a favor by introducing us to the work of Austin playwright Dan Dietz, whose short plays have been produced at Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival. Since its 2003 premiere in Austin, tempOdyssey has been produced in Denver, San Diego and Washington, D.C.

Genny, tempOdyssey’s hapless heroine, flees from Atlanta to Seattle (“the anti-Atlanta”) to begin a new life as a temp at Ithaca-techno-solutions. When you note the firm’s title can also be broken down as “Ithacatech, no solutions,” you recognize the sort of verbal playfulness that will color Dietz’s script.

The overbearing Last Day Girl lays down the law for poor Genny. As receptionist, she’s not allowed to leave her desk unmanned – ever. One bathroom break in the morning, one in the afternoon – if she can find someone to sub for her. Her supervisor, the crazed Nepotism Guy, freaks out over the breaking of a pencil.

Alarmed to learn the company makes bombs, Genny’s more obsessed with black holes and the creation of one by scientists – because she’s convinced that she’s trying to outrun one of her own.

“It wasn’t me, it was the black hole,” is her trademark apology.

When she was eight, Genny displayed a rare gift for strangling chickens. Her chicken-farmer parents made her their star chicken choker, bringing prosperity to the family, but leaving Genny cursed. She can’t forget all the deaths inflicted by her hands, the look in those chickens’ eyes. Genny found that all the people with whom she forged a close bond became ill and died of such illnesses as bronchitis or throat cancer – but really (Genny feels) “choked” by the touch of her hands.

Since the fellow temp who becomes Genny’s ally is identified in the program as Dead Body Boy, I’m not spoiling any secret by disclosing that Genny has not lost her fatal touch. But as the story has long since veered into absurdist fantasy, the garrulous victim refuses to behave as if he’s dead. Meanwhile, Genny winds up in possession of a bomb and contemplates blowing up herself, Ithacatech and possibly much of Seattle, while the Security Guy tries to talk her out of it.

tempOdyssey’s post-modern melange of genres and styles is all over the place. It moves from satire of office life to cosmic matters, with wild non-sequitur rants and mock lectures by lab-coated scientists along the way. What Dietz really seems to be getting at is our frustrating helplessness before the whims of fate.

The loose parallel to Homer’s Odyssey goes undeveloped, but that hardly matters with all the other stuff Dietz tosses. If the writing is messy, it’s also smart, sarcastic and offbeat, registering a distinctive voice. Dietz has a neat way of expressing an idea, as when Genny explains that a black hole requires just two ingredients, zero and infinity “clinging together like teenage lovers in a bad pop song.”

Or when, told to smile, Genny replies “What the difference, they’re just teeth.”

tempOdyssey constitutes a challenge for a young company like Nova Arts and one appreciates the enthusiasm with which director Clint Hopper and his cast respond. His staging conveys the bizarre tale with energy, punch and some neat visuals, like the floating scientific formulae projected onto the set.

Amy Hopper does good work as the unusual protagonist: forlorn, cowed, bewildered, yet with a strange quiet power. She’s dangerous, yet sympathetic.

The characters surrounding her are mostly mad eccentrics, and the director has them gesture and pose in exaggerated manner. Bernardo Cubria creates a distinctive character of the sly, wry, knowing Dead Body Boy. Jenni Rebecca Stephenson is aptly domineering as the bossy Last Day Girl, and especially funny as Fran, a sort of Supreme Being Temp. Paul Salazar contorts himself like a young Jerry Lewis as the explosively physical Nepotism Guy. Sean Patrick Judge plays Genny’s sour, overall-clad Daddy in comparatively straight mode, while Salvador Chevez serves up an amusing cameo as the black hole-explicating Scientist.

To sum up, I’m put in mind of an amusing line from Kander and Ebb’s Flora, the Red Menace: “It’s refreshing to meet someone odd, for a change.”

Just as it’s refreshing to encounter a likably odd play like tempOdyssey.

everett.evans@chron.com