Houston Press Review: “Loving Love Loves a Pornographer”

Thanks, DL!!!

Loving Love Loves a Pornographer
Nova Arts Project surprises with a wicked Victorian comedy-of-manners parody

By D.L. Groover
Published: April 17, 2008

Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex
2201 Preston, 713-623-4033

Details:
Through April 26. $15-$30.

It takes a few minutes to become acclimated to Nova Arts Project’s immaculate staging of Love Loves a Pornographer, Jeff Goode’s wicked parody of a late Victorian comedy of manners. This isn’t because the satire is odd and edgy — it’s downright classical, if truth be told — but because we don’t expect something quite like this from the avant-garde troupe, certainly not after its surreal tempOdyssey, wacky, CSI: Denmark-inspired Hamlet or crazy-quilt Oedipus3. Goode’s beguiling sex comedy begins with an obsequious butler, a fine old English country house and fine English landed gentry, who seem to have crash-landed from an unknown play by Pinero, Shaw and, most assuredly, Wilde. Epigrams, waistcoats, dueling pistols — this is not typical Nova territory. But once we shake our head clear of expectations, allow the radiant cast to work its definite magic and relax into Goode’s extremely funny play, we’re bathed in first-class entertainment all the way. Love is the cleverest play on either side of the bayou this month.

A prolific playwright, Goode has unbridled humor, an ink-blot view of the world and an absolute love of words — qualities that serve him perfectly in Love, his loving, anachronistic tribute to, and parody of, Oscar Wilde. It’s difficult to spoof Wilde, since his arch style pricked his own society and class. Of course, Wilde’s shallowness and pretense hid great depth, but he wasn’t about to say so. Goode takes Wilde’s basic tenets — superficial characters, witty dialogue, mistaken/misplaced identities, sublimated sex, tony language – and flicks them with his own brand of body English. Love never falters or loses momentum, it just moves faster and more furiously, making the plot funnier as it becomes more convoluted and improbable. This is a neat trick for any writer, and Goode pulls it off brilliantly. Wilde is definitely smiling.

Love is no slavish imitator, though, and pulls some neat tricks all its own. Fennimore, the Butler, sits offstage at a table loaded with props and reads a newspaper when not “on.” Daughter Emily wears proper Victorian garb, yet sports sneakers and striped socks. Earl, Emily’s American fiancé, wears 21st-century casual. A child’s crayon drawing is talked about as if it were a Gainsborough, and Fennimore uses a TV clicker to announce the act titles. These delectable postmodern deconstructions cheekily add to the fun. The play almost pops in 3-D.

Any detailed description threatens to deflate this finely crafted confection by revealing its numerous twists and surprises, but here are some basics — believe it or not, they’re interconnected. Lord Cyril Loveworthy (Seán Patrick Judge) supplements his income by writing pornography under a pseudonym. His nemesis, Reverend Miles Monger (Timothy Evers), the influential literary critic of the Times of London and a sanctimonious prig, might be on intimate terms with Lady Lillian, Cyril’s wife (Jenni Rebecca Stephenson). Out of jealousy, might Cyril be dallying with Millicent, Monger’s lovely but frustrated wife (Melissa Davis)? Daughter Emily (Katrina Ellsworth) has returned from travels in America not with a genuine earl, as was expected, but with Earl (Bobby Haworth), a questionable mountain man who sells unsavory literature in Flagstaff, Arizona. Mrs. Monger may have committed suicide in the garden, but the guests spend time arguing over who has the proper social standing to investigate. Fennimore (Wayne Barnhill) is chastised for swooning when he should leave that to his betters.

Of course, in plays like this, no one is ever who they seem, and reversals and surprises are a matter of course. Goode keeps us guessing — and listening. Timed to perfection, the words, barbed and dangerous, or flighty and shallow as the clueless characters spouting them, swirl like clouds. Love is intricately structured to allow the witty Wilde-like throwaways their deserved position front and center, such as Lady Lillian’s wonderful “No married woman should be left alone with a firearm. The temptation is simply too great.” Or Monger’s: “Money should never be earned, when it can be inherited.”

Under Rob Kimbro’s faceted direction, the cast of seven is a dream. Judge is particularly effective in relaying Lord Loveworthy’s commanding tone and haughty sense of entitlement. But it is Evers, as the smug Monger, who steals the show with his marvelously twitchy performance. Encased in costumer Kiza Moore’s straitlaced greatcoat, with hair combed straight down, glasses nailed to the very tip of his nose, and those long bony fingers constantly on the prowl over his watch chain, he’s a George Cruikshank illustration come to life. Self-righteous and proud of it, his dirty little secret drives the play, and Evers takes the wheel with glee.

Amazingly smart and very funny, Love Loves a Pornographer has class, style and wit. The comedy, whose world premiere was only five months ago, proves that new, fresh theater doesn’t have to be dumbed down to work like gangbusters. It just has to be good — or better, Goode.

Houston Chronicle: Ingenious wordplay drives Pornographer

Ingenious wordplay drives Pornographer

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

By EVERETT EVANS

Sometimes you can pinpoint the exact moment when a play irrevocably pulls you into its corner. With Jeff Goode’s Love Loves a Pornographer, getting a nifty Houston premiere courtesy of Nova Arts Project, it’s this inspired bit of verbal lunacy:

“Your latest creation elicits illicit elations.”

Goode’s playful homage to drawing room comedy has already rhapsodized about “savage enravagements” and tossed off wry epigrams such as “A man should take pride in his livelihood, however shameful.” Not to mention the priggish antagonist who, described as “rakish,” defends himself with this choice retort: “In my entire life, I have never been rakish with so much as a leaf-strewn lawn.”

Yet for me, it was that “illicit elations” line that put the play over the top. Despite a few lulls here and there and a sense of winding down near the close, Pornographer can be recommended for the sheer merriment of its ingenious wordplay and the fun this cast generates delivering it. It’s the heightened language that’s supposed to sound like stage talk, not everyday talk.

Premiered in December by Los Angeles’ Circle X Theatre Company, Pornographer starts out as a tribute to, or spoof of, Victorian drawing room comedy as epitomized by Oscar Wilde. Yet midway, it acquires a more modernist bent — as if a play by John Guare or Christopher Durang or Paul Rudnick had wandered in and mingled with the earlier model.

Famed novelist Lord Cyril Loveworthy and his wife, Lady Lillian, entertain the Rev. Miles Monger, who also happens to be the Times of London’s lead literary critic, and his wife, Millicent. Lord Loveworthy, whose writing is respected but not sufficiently lucrative, tries to blackmail Rev. Monger into a favorable review of his next book. Lord Loveworthy needs the boost so that he can finance the wedding of his daughter, Emily.

Emily arrives with the man she plans to marry — not “an earl” as her parents had misunderstood, but Earl, a scruffy bookseller Emily met in Flagstaff, Arizona. While the other characters are steadfastly British and Victorian in speech and attire, Earl is thoroughly contemporary and American. Before long, other anachronisms creep into the scene. One character leafs through an issue of Vanity Fair. Another sips not from a teacup but a can of soft drink.

The thunderbolt is the revelation that Earl’s bookstore specializes in erotica. “Earl is a pornographer” Emily announces, the punchline just before intermission (at which the butler faints dead away.) The second half is (as the butler announces) “a series of shocking revelations.” All pertain to which of the other characters are secret readers of the star author whose work Earl sells, or have secretly written those books, or even secretly inspired the whole series through real-life experiences recounted in a diary.

Was every Victorian a secret hedonist? As one character observes, “You make this licentiousness sound almost medicinal.”

An exercise in theatrical style, Pornographer marks a change of pace for the young Nova Arts group. Director Rob Kimbro generally keeps things crisp, brisk and light of touch. Apart from a few hesitant moments (and remember, many of these lines are a mouthful), this team gives the play a capable rendition.

Sean Patrick Judge makes Lord Loveworthy sly, condescending and morally slippery. Given many of the script’s most potentially tongue-tangling lines, he handles them with authority. Timothy Evers makes an amusing foil as the stuffy, stodgy Miles Monger — prim, prudish and sourly disapproving.s

Jenni Rebecca Stephenson brings haughty confidence to Lady Loveworthy. Melissa N. Davis’ Millicent Monger is particularly appealing, indefatigably cheery with an unabashedly saucy streak.

Bobby Haworth’s laid-back Earl Kant seems to have wandered in from another play, continent and century, which is exactly the point. Katrina Ellsworth shows daughter Emily’s increasing iconclasm and rebelliousness.

As the butler, Wayne Barnhill, formerly of Infernal Bridegroom, has a droll way of being unflappably obliging to his “betters” yet at the same time mocking them.

You might say that while Love Loves a Pornographer is not quite Wilde, it’s certainly very Goode.

LOVE LOVES A PORNOGRAPHER

• When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, through April 26
• Where: Nova Arts Project, at Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex, 2201 Preston

• Tickets: $15-$30; 713-623-4033

http://www.novaartsproject.com/

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