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Arts & Entertainment
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Ray Renati
“ THE PERFECT SUMMER MOVIE ! � Bill Zwecker, FOX-TV
S DUGAN “GROWN UPS� COLUMBIA PICTURES PRESENTS IN ASSOCIATION WITH RELATI VITY MEDIA A HAPPY MADISON PRODUCTION A FILM BY DENNI MUSIC MUSIC SALMA HAYEK MARI A BELLO MAYA RUDOLPH SUPERVISION BY MICHAEL DILBECK BROOKS ARTHUR KEVIN GRADY BY RUPERT GREGSON-WILLIAMS EXECUTIVE WRITTEN PRODUCED PRODUCERS BARRY BERNARDI TIM HERLIHY ALLEN COVERT STEVE KOREN BY ADAM SANDLER & FRED WOLF BY ADAM SANDLER JACK GIARRAPUTO DIRECTED BY DENNIS DUGAN CHECK LOCAL LISTINGS FOR THEATERS AND SHOWTIMES
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From left, Carolyn Ford Compton, Beverley Griffith and Roberta Morris in “The Shaker Chair.�
Get up, stand up ‘The Shaker Chair’ could be a call to action, but it needs more pep by Kevin Kirby n Adam Bock’s one-act play “The Shaker Chair,� a middleTHEATER REVIEW aged woman becomes involved with a group of animal-rights activists engaged in a pitched battle manner, with each actor politely against a local pig farm. As pre- waiting his or her turn before “insented by the Pear Avenue Theatre terrupting,� it makes the characters in Mountain View, this ostensibly seem anything but spontaneously thoughtful play clocks in at rough- real. With the Pear’s production, ly an hour and a quarter — shorter we are painfully aware that we are than your typical summer cineplex watching actors perform a minutely blockbuster. Sadly, one can’t help scripted fiction. It’s not that director Ann Kuchins but feel that this would be a bethas assembled a batch of bad actors; ter show if its running time were she just needs to help them pick up shorter still. the pace. Timing aside, most of the This is not to say that the script is cast give credible performances. too long. In fact, the arrow-straight Carolyn Ford Compton plays plot could use a bit of fleshing out. Marion, a middle-aged woman Rather, the Pear’s production is who has just purchased a narrow, undermined by performances that are almost without exception ener- straight-backed, Shaker-style chair, gized, focused and accurate, but far apparently as part of her search for deeper spiritual meaning. Throughtoo slow. Crisp pacing is important to out the play, Marion does quite a bit any show, but it is especially cru- of talking about the Shakers: their cial in this case due to the nature dedication to simplicity, to cleanliof Bock’s dialogue. Bock is fond ness, to rooting out sloth. The unof half-formed thoughts, one-word comfortable chair, she speculates, interjections, incomplete sentences was their way of reminding us we and characters who talk over one should be on our feet, doing someanother. In reviewing a previous thing useful. But the catalyst that finally gets production of “The Shaker Chair,� Marion out of that chair (and into the Louisville Courier-Journal dethe very messy world) is her friend scribed it thus: “(Bock’s) dialogue is Jean, played with verve by Beverley naturalistic, peppered with stops and Griffith. Jean is a guerilla warrior starts ... that make his stage characin the battle against factory farmters appear spontaneously real.� ing. Incensed by the cruelty and Unfortunately, when this sort of environmental degradation that she dialogue is presented in a plodding has witnessed at the pig farm, she
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is unshakable in her conviction that drastic actions are not only justified, but morally imperative. Despite her reservations, Marion joins Jean and her co-conspirators on a 3 a.m. raid, and her home becomes a refuge for young eco-felons and, briefly, a rescued piglet. The former are played by John Beamer and Adrienne Walters; the latter, by a nonchalant pink and black newcomer named, appropriately, Pearblossom. Beamer’s performance is passionate and would probably be funny if not for the sluggish pace of the dialogue. Of all the cast, Walters seems most comfortable with the sort of verbal jostling that Bock’s writing seeks to capture, and a few of her exchanges with Griffith have the snap of spontaneous speech. Rounding out the cast are Roberta Morris and Vic Prosak as Marion’s sister and brother-in-law, respectively. Prosak’s character is a surly lout, motivated by seething anger at god-knows-what, and Morris, as his wife, has the horrid task of playing a woman who is too spineless to tell him off. Bock hints that there’s more to their relationship than a sad clichĂŠ, but he never delivers on it, and their subplot ultimately goes nowhere. It’s possible that the show will tighten up over the course of its run and the actors’ delivery will become more natural. As it stands now, the gaps in the dialogue prevent us from being caught up in the scenes’ momentum, giving us time to recognize the script’s shortcomings — specifically, a thin plot, a clumsily delivered climax, and an unsuccessful attempt to graft a symbol (the titular chair) onto a story about anti-pig-farm activism. In the end, one suspects that Bock isn’t all that interested in the evils of factory farming, per se. He devotes virtually no time to educating his audience on the issue, let alone to winning converts. Jean and her cohorts rattle off a few breathless, inchoate words about sewage spilling everywhere and pigs living in crowded pens, but that’s the extent of it. The audience’s philosophical complicity is more or less assumed. For Bock, the pig story is merely a means to an end, just as foxes and grapes were for Aesop. It’s a construct that leads us to the author’s moral — a moral that he spells out for us in terms barely more subtle than in one of Aesop’s fables. In short: “Complacency is bad; action is good.â€? And in the universe of this play, it doesn’t matter if that action is violent, illegal, or utterly ineffectual. Why? Because that darn Shaker chair wants us to get up and do something, even if it’s something that the nonviolent Shakers would have found abhorrent. N What: “The Shaker Chair,â€? presented by Pear Avenue Theatre Where: Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Ave., Unit K, Mountain View When: Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. through July 10, plus 2 p.m. performances on July 10 & 11. Cost: Tickets are $25 for Friday and Saturday evenings and $20 for all other performances, with discounts for students and seniors. Info: Call the box office at 650-2541148 or go to www.thepear.org.