|
Design Credits
Rights and Policies
Staff Login
Rent
the Helen Mills Theater for performances, screenings, and readings.
|
|
Happy In The Poorhouse Slings It With A Broad Brush
by Michael Bettencourt
Happy In The Poorhouse reviewed March 11, 2010
|
|
I don't know if Happy In The Poorhouse, the new offering by The Amoralists at Theatre 80 St. Marks, is funny, but it is comedic. No bit of shtick, no over-used stock character, no gender or cultural stereotype, is too insignificant to go into writer and director Derek Ahonen's theater bucket, into which he then dips his big broad brush and throws whatever he picks up onto the canvas. The result is ramshackle and vaudevillian, which at least to the opening-night audience came off as laugh-out-loud funny.
Happy In The Poorhouse is something of a love triangle among Paulie "The Pug" (James Kautz, playing a local low-level celeb as a mixed martial arts fight-club star), his wife Mary (Sarah Lemp), and Mary's ex-husband Petie "The Pit" (William Apps), a paraplegic Iraq war veteran. Paulie hasn't consummated the marriage with Mary for eight months because he has a moral dilemma about Petie, who, on the day the action opens, is due at a homecoming celebration arranged by Mary. No one knows that Petie is crippled until the door is flung open for his entrance, accompanied by his gay nurse (Nick Lawson), at the end of Act I.
Petie wants Mary back, Mary wants Paulie to "do her," Paulie is conflicted because of a nasty secret he and Petie share about an act of violence involving Paulie's parents -- not to mention Paulie's hunger to be a top-flight fighter in the "cage" so that he can rise above his crappy job as a bouncer and his crappy life on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. Mary just wants to get laid so that she can feel loved, and Petie, though functionally impotent because of his wound, believes that he is more than enough of man for Mary and deserves to get her back (even though he treated her like a dog when they were married).
A couple of side-pairings slosh more pigment into the theater bucket. Joey (Matthew Pilieci), Mary's brother and a USPS letter carrier, beds Flossie (Meghan Ritchie), a buxom 16-year-old-pretending-to-be-an-18-year-old. Penny (Rochelle Mikulich), Paulie's sister and a country-music star on the run for a petty theft, strides in arm-in-arm with her Germanic lesbian lover Olga (Selente Beretta), to whom Mr. Ahonen, true to the spirit of his style, has do a "Sieg Heil" and a goose-step while holding her little finger over her top lip as a pencil moustache.
And as if the bucket isn't full enough, Flossie's uncles, Sonny (Morton Matthews) and Sally (Mark Riccadonna), try to shake Joey down for his "rape" of their underage niece since they are $10,000 in debt to a loan shark because of a recently deceased gambling-addicted grandmother. Eventually they have to face Larry "The Lab" (Patrick McDaniel), the loan shark's enforcer, who has come to collect what's due, but Joey saves their bacon by giving Larry $8500 he's pilfered from Christmas and birthday cards with cash in them. ("Never send cash," he advises Paulie at the end of the play.)
The dialogue, though it tries hard for snap and crackle, is less like a crisp, honed back-and-forth and more like conversations shouted over loud music at the bar where Paulie works: the decibel level of everyone in this play probably exceeds some city ordinance, and the actors go at the script's words with sonic gusto.
In the end, all that is unraveled becomes tied-back-together, dreams are honored if not exactly fulfilled, Mary and Paulie finally "do it," and life goes on in Mr. Ahonen's version of working-class Coney Island.
The humor, such as it is, gets played out in an apartment designed by Al Schatz, with garish wallpaper, thin walls (which Paulie keeps punching through in anger), and undistinguished furniture. Costume designer Ricky Lang follows Mr. Ahonen's aesthetic, dressing Penny in a cornflower dress with white cowboy boots, Olga in black high-waisted silver-buttoned peg-legged pants, Flossie's uncles in garish shirts that even the Salvation Army would think twice about accepting, and Mary in a clinging mid-thigh slip of a dress and red high heels. Lighting and sound were mostly on/off, not adding or taking away anything from the production.
Mr. Ahonen is not a subtle painter of souls -- his tools of choice are the broad brush and the trowel. It's not clear in what way Happy In The Poorhouse exemplifies The Amoralists' declaration that they create works that explore "complex characters of moral ambiguity" since none of these Coney Island denizens are allowed to exhibit ambiguity as the play races them and the audience through its farcical paces. But perhaps it's better to just put that aside and watch what Mr. Ahonen flings up onto the stage, enjoying what you enjoy and letting the rest run off.
 Click here to view the printer-friendly version of this review
|
|
Theatre 80 St. Marks
|
Category: Drama
Written by: Derek Ahonen
Directed by: Derek Ahonen
Produced by: The Amoralists
Opened: March 11, 2010
Closed: April 5, 2010
Running Time:
Theater: Theatre 80 St. Marks
Address: 80 St. Marks Place (between 1st and 2nd Avenues)
New York, NY 10003
Yahoo! Maps Directions
| |
|
Tickets: $40.00
Tickets are $20 for students.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
