possessed Mind The Gap Theatre to honour beer as small as this three-pack of
comedies by Christopher Durang? Four talented actors give it their all, but
it is a measure of the plays’ dramatic poverty that neither their warm-hearted
performances nor the well-paced direction of Alicia Dhyana House can leaven
the leaden lines they have to work with.
The first of the trio is the best, and not just because it’s the
shortest. The eponymous Mrs Sorken is a batty culture
vulture from Connecticut, a Dame Edna grotesque who parades opinionated
ignorance about matters theatrical to her captive audience, us. In Janet
Prince’s vivid performance, the old dear’s ramblings are a tennis-elbow-foot
game of thought association and an excuse for Durang to post a catalogue of
theatre gags, often at the expense of his more illustrious peers (Kushner,
Mamet – they must be quaking). There are chuckles to be had as Mrs Sorken’s
befuddled mind takes its semantic left turns, such as when a reference to
‘Seconal’ triggers the word ‘secondly’…
…which brings us to For Whom the Southern Belle
Tolls. This parody of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass
Menagerie misses the mark entirely, and as the extended centrepiece
of an extremely long one-hour evening it is terminally, as well as
interminably, witless. Any goodwill earned by Mrs Sorken’s opening monologue
fades with the realisation that Durang’s highest aspiration here is to mock
minority groups. Forget the moral high ground; they may be easy targets for a
comedy kicking, but this writing just isn’t funny.
As a dysfunctional mother-son duo, Prince and Stuart Williams chew
Ji-Youn Chang’s neat scenery – there is little else they could do with this
material – while Melanie McHugh overacts valiantly as (you’ll love this) a
deaf lesbian counterpart to the source play’s Gentleman Caller. Dan Frost as Tom, the brother, has to emulate the stylised ‘memory play’ narration of the original; but apart from that his role, like the sketch as a whole, amounts to very little.
It’s a relief to reach the final furlong. Nina in the
Morning, another quickie, involves all four actors again and provides
Prince with a sweetly directed face-lift gag. Williams morphs from southern
simpleton into French dandy, still gurning, and McHugh rushes around manically
as all three of our heroine’s sons. What’s it about? I’ve forgotten already,
but lubricity enters into it. At least the time slipped by.
