REVIEW: Trustus Theatre's Tail! Spin!

by: Kyle Petersen

Tail! Spin! is quite the appropriate beginning to Trustus Theatre’s 32nd season. Smart, raunchy, irreverent, and curious, it takes the audience’s incessant interest in the current political season and steers it into the recent past to take stock of the peculiar sexual preoccupations and peccadillos that seem to come along with politics.

The play, written (or assembled?) by Mario Correa, uses exclusively previous statements, interviews, dialogue, and social media content to tell the stories of the sex scandals of four politicians: Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who was caught soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom; New York Representative (and failed NYC mayoral candidate) Anthony Weiner, who has a sexting addiction; Florida House Representative Mark Foley, who had inappropriate relationships with many underage male pages; and our own South Carolina Governor (and current House Representative) Mark Sanford, who handled a dopey extra-marital affair in the most clumsy way possible.

The premise is a challenging one, particularly given that just five actors (and only one woman) are tasked with bringing to life these rapid-fire, often fragmented narratives to life without sacrificing any comic timing, but Trustus, as usual, shines. Although a more-barebones and unadventurous set and sound design than is typical for the theatre, the acting and directing here is top-notch, elevating itself clearly above the world of SNL sketches and late night show fodder with which it shares similar DNA in its witty and puerile subject matter. Stann Gwynn delivers a note-perfect, awkwardly fastidious Larry Craig alongside Kevin Bush as the undercover agent who arrests him and Ellen Rodillo-Fowler as his hilariously in-denial wife. Both Bush and Rodillo-Fowler end up being MVPs throughout, darting through such a dizzying array of roles that makes the play double as an acting showcase. Bush’s nuanced, complex take on Mark Foley, the lone sinning politician which inspires some sympathy here, is perhaps the best moment, and the fact that he couples it with scene-stealing imitations of Stephen Colbert and the South Carolina State House Speaker is fairly incredible.

For her part, Rodillo-Fowler has to tackle every single female role in the piece, often leading to her having to literally interview herself as both Barbara Walter and Jenny Sanford (her Walters impression is priceless). While she delivers a remarkably graceful performance given the circumstances (there were a couple of moments where clarity suffered, although the writing seems the most likely culprit), the fact that the play doesn’t add a second female actor is either an intentional nod to the relative absence of women in politics or a reification of the boys club-default that exists in both political and comedic worlds. Either way, it would have been nice for her to have some help.

Joseph Eisenreich as Anthony Weiner and Clint Poston as Mark Sanford also perform nicely as both main characters and reliable sidemen—Eisenreich in particular comes in handy as he moves from the lascivious braggadocio of Weiner to the innocent adolescent that Bush’s Foley is obsessed with. Neither plays their main parts to type—Eisenreich is more All-American boyish in the Marco Rubio mold than the wiry, nervy real-life Weiner, while Poston plays Sanford with every bit of the principled conviction and quaint narcissism of our former governor, but without the aw-shucks bizarreness that characterized many of his even less-famous press appearances.

Director Jason Stokes, along with his top-rate cast, deserve credit for honing the fragmented give-and-take nature of this challenging script into clear punch lines and playfully subversive juxtapositions. You could see the play falling apart if performed by a lesser crew, instead of delivering two hours of solid laughs.

As far as any larger meaning or political statement, I’m not sure if I quite see one beyond the fact that it’s our current, sexually-charged and politically-saturated media culture  that makes this collage-like production possible, and that the hypocritical positions that we demand (or that politicians demand of themselves?) is a historical reality that gets endlessly repeated.

The bottom line, though, is that if the all-too-painful comedic reality of the current Presidential race has you down, Tail! Spin! serves as a reminder that absurdity is par for the course for our political landscape, and we might as well laugh at it.

Jason Stokes Talks About Tail! Spin! Opening Friday Night at Trustus Theatre

It's easy for a performing arts organization, be it theatre, dance, or music-based, to stick with the safe bet. Fill the seats by offering shows your audience has become accustomed to. Go to the same old pool, season after season, and keep it all familiar so your organization can pay the rent. And as long as your audience never leaves the city limits they may not realize that one of the responsibilities of an arts organization is to nurture the cultural literacy of its audience by offering new works. Works that challenge or discomfit. Works that take chances. Works that go out on a limb and take the audience with them as they shakily find their balance, but ultimately enjoy the view. While too many organizations in Columbia adhere to this boring, stagnating, audience-offending policy -- and we'll be writing more about this soon -- at least, and thank whoever the god of the performing arts is for this, we have Trustus Theatre.

Yes, Trustus has some familiar fun coming up this season (Walter Graham plays the alien transvestite Frank N. Furter in the delicious Rocky Horror Picture Show, for example). But at the same time, Trustus never fails to continue to take chances. Be it via the Trustus Playwright's Festival which last month gave us Anatomy of a Hug, one of the oddest little, top-notch shows we've seen in a while -- fresh, brand new, exciting; or via shows like the one opening Friday night on the Cohn Side Door Stage -- Tail! Spin! 

Directed by Jason Stokes,  Tail! Spin! stars Stann Gwynn, Kevin Bush, Clint Poston, Joseph Eisenreich, and Ellen Rodillo-Fowler. We asked Stokes to tell us a bit about where the story came from and how he plans to bring it to the stage. Find his comments below and plan to come out to check out this fascinating and funny piece of political theatre. It's new and different, and it should be perfect for the political season.  - CB

Directing Tail! Spin! by Jason Stokes 

Tail! Spin! chronicles the real life political scandals of Larry Craig, Anthony Weiner, Mark Foley and Mark Sanford using their own texts, emails, Facebook messages, IM’s, and interviews. Using their own public and private words to tell the story in my opinion changes this show from being just a strict “by the numbers” bio-play, into a dramedy version of reality. The show hinges on each person’s scandal, but at its core, the show really details the toll their  actions take on them, their families, and political careers while bringing them face to face with who they really are thanks in no small part the modern-day twenty-four hour media coverage.  Some of the men are unable, or unwilling, to accept this new self-revelation.

From the beginning, the most difficult task of directing this piece was finding the right balance between the acts of these men and their humorous attempts to spin the details to a more favorable outcome. It’s my opinion that in order to get to the US Senate, House or Governor’s mansion you must possess a certain amount of intelligence … even if the intelligence comes from a team; the individual must be smart enough to adhere to the sound advice of others.  But the politicians focused on in this play react like children with their hands caught in the proverbial cookie jar after their sexual indiscretions are discovered. And their mindset becomes “If I don’t admit anything, then nobody will know.”  As is so often the case with political scandal, the denial becomes worse than the act.

We find ourselves in a polarizing political and social climate at present. Compromise is a dirty word, if you’re a republican then the democrats have no validity in their thoughts or policies; and if you’re a democrat, the republicans have lost their minds and their party is a mess with no real hope of salvation and thus should be completely cast aside (Yes, I’m generalizing, but find any two members of either party and ask them to agree on something, anything).  Which is why this show comes to Columbia at the absolute right time. While the subject matter can be shocking and their attempt to keep it quiet should be laughed at, hopefully, the audience will see these men as flawed human beings who made really, really bad decisions that when pieced together the way the playwright has, prove quite hilarious. And maybe for a few moments, we can all be Americans enjoying a night of entertainment together, as one people, the way we should be. To quote Dennis Miller however... "Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."

Jason Stokes first appeared at Trustus as Adam in 2002’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.  Other Trustus roles include Roger in Rent, Rocky in The Rocky Horror Show, Luke in Next Fall. Other shows in the Columbia area include The Full Monty, Sleuth, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In January of this year he held a reading of his new screenplay Composure, detailing the murder of N.G. Gonzales by SC Lieutenant Gov. James Tillman, in the Trustus Side Door.  He has also written, produced and directed four films, the most recent film  blocked was featured in the 2nd Act Film Festival, presented by The Jasper Project. 

REVIEW: Marie Antoinette at Trustus Theatre - by Jennifer Hill

“I was built to be this thing and now they're killing me for it." -- Marie Antoinette

Trustus Theater starts off its 31^st season strong with Marie Antoinette by David Adjmi. In the first act, Director Robert Richmond takes the audience down the rabbit hole to a French rave where Marie Antoinette is the Mad Hatter presiding over what appears to be her own opulent, insane tea party, which sets the pace for the evening. This is not a stuffy historical piece by any means. It’s sexy, provocative, humorous, and it eventually takes you to a very dark place.

Jennifer Moody Sanchez is our Marie, the girl who was plucked from Austria at 14 years old to marry wimpy Louis XVI, played by G. Scott Wild, and then went on to become the Queen of France at the tender age of 19. Moody Sanchez is a strong performer, giving us a Marie that is silly and frivolous, but grows strong with backbone as the play goes on, and ultimately descends into madness during her final days.  Moody Sanchez did some of her best work of the night in the second act as Marie grapples with sanity in her prison cell. It’s a series of intense scenes and Moody Sanchez gives a haunting performance. Props to Robert Richmond for being willing to take it so dark. Bold choices are powerful, especially when a director uses them to create a very consistent stylized world, like Richmond has. That said, I would have liked to have seen more vulnerability in Marie at times, something with which we can empathize and connect.

Sanchez is not alone in offering a fine performance. G. Scott Wild gives us a perfect Louis XVI; an awkward, possibly impotent, man-child. Marie’s ladies of the court, Therese De Lomballe, played by Lindsay Rae Taylor, and Yolande de Polignac played by Ellen Rodillo-Fowler are like those two girls at a party who keep pressuring you to take another shot; the kind of women who tell you “go ahead, buy it in both colors” on a shopping trip, the ‘yes’ women to Marie. I especially liked Rodillo-Fowler in her scene as a creepy peasant and Taylor’s scenes as Therese showing true friendship to Marie. Eric Bultman plays the most striking and sexy sheep anyone would ever want to see. That’s right, he plays Marie’s sheep friend, her spirit animal, and he sometimes informs her of the realities of her situation. Bultman physically nails every beat. The terribly handsome Ben Blazer plays Axel Fersen, Marie’s man on the side. Blazer has a nice natural stage presence that is so easy to believe. Paul Kaufmann plays the Revolutionary who imprisons Marie and her family. Kauffman is a strong actor who makes a nice subtle transformation over the second act, in that he starts out with extreme hatred for Marie, but that hatred slowly turns to pity as her execution draws near. Chris Cook plays Joseph, Marie’s brother, come to get answers for why an heir hasn’t been produced in the seven years since Marie and Louis have been married. Cook is a joy to watch: he has impeccable timing and gives some really delightful deliveries that keep the audience laughing. Cade Melnyk, with a face of a cherub, plays the little Dauphin very well. He happens to be in one of my favorite scenes, a carriage ride depicted using only three chairs. The three actors sell it with perfect timing and movement which results in a very believable and entertaining scene.

Costumes by Jean Gonzalaz Lomasto were a joy. Marie’s frocks are one-of-a-kind pieces of art, as were the wigs by Mark Ziegler and the jewelry by Neely Wald. The lighting design by Marc Hearst was on point; I particularly enjoyed a scene where Marie and Axel watch fireworks in the distance. I really enjoyed what Baxter Engle did with the sound during the prison/madness scenes; an echoing treatment that is very effective. The set, designed by Kimi Maeda and constructed by Brandon Mclver is quite impressive as basically a giant reflective guillotine blade, always there, always reminding us where this is all going to end.

And that’s really what it’s all about, right? The falling of a great star. We build them up to burn them down a la 2007's Britney Spears. Marie herself pretty much sums it up toward the end of the second act, “I was built to be this thing and now they're killing me for it”. Overall, it’s a beautiful production, well played and well executed. (Pun intended.) A feast for the eyes. Get your tickets to the disco mad tea party now as shows will be selling out. The show runs through Oct.3^rd.

Correction: A previous version of this review omitted the contributions of Neely Wald. 

Review -- August: Osage County

Jasper loves dysfunctional families.  Wait, let's clarify that - Jasper loves Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas about dysfunctional families, and there's a doozy of one running right now through Sat. Nov. 12th, at Trustus Theatre. August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts, is billed as Jim Thigpen's directorial swan song; he and wife Kay, with whom he founded Trustus 26 years ago, will retire at the end of this season (see the current issue of Jasper at http://jaspercolumbia.net/current-issue/ for details.) Fortunately, he has assembled a highly functional cast of family, both literal (brother Ron Hale and daughter Erin Wilson) and theatrical (a veritable who's who of local theatrical talent) to bring this provocative and compelling work to Columbia audiences.

The show recounts a few weeks in the lives of the Weston family, disrupted by the disappearance of the father. His three daughters return home, family and significant others in tow, to support their mother, and along the way we meet an aunt, and uncle, a cousin, and a few innocent bystanders. I was only familiar with this work from some reviews I read a few years ago, when it premiered and promptly won the Tony and N.Y. Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play, the Drama Desk and Outer Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Play, and the Pulitzer. As a result, I had some misconceptions going in.  This is in no way, shape or fashion a comedy, even a dark one.  There are certainly some witty lines; most of the characters are fairly eloquent people connected to academia, and often barbs spoken in moments of great anger, frustration, and passion get some big laughs. Nevertheless, this play is a tragedy of the ordinary, an examination of the dark underbelly of contemporary American society, depicted before us via one truly unfortunate family.

Likewise, the title notwithstanding, this isn't really a rural or country-themed play at all.  While there is a plaid shirt here, some cowboy boots there, a backdrop that suggests dull stucco or adobe walls, and a Native American housekeeper, the setting isn't so much Oklahoma as it is any desolate location, and the desolation is as much spiritual as literal. One character notes that this isn't the Midwest, but rather the Plains, which he compares to the Blues, just not as interesting.  Nor is the show particularly surreal or avant-garde, as I somehow had expected. Sadly, the obstacles that confront these characters (with perhaps one Southern Gothic exception) are all too commonplace: divorce, infidelity, youthful rebellion, repression, substance abuse, suicide, and depression. The language is sometimes quite eloquent and poetic, but more often quite down-to-earth and familiar.

Yet this is a tremendously entertaining evening at the theatre, thanks to the supremely talented cast. While each of the thirteen actors gets his or her moment to shine on stage, top honors have to go to Libby Campbell Turner, in the central role of Violet, the harsh matriarch of the Weston family. We first see Violet helplessly struggling to form her words and thoughts as a result of her addiction to painkillers; the effect is shocking, especially for those familiar with Campbell Turner's assertive stage presence in any number of shows over the last several decades. Have no fear, however: Violet's coherence returns with a vengeance, as she tries to bring down each of her three daughters in turn. We chillingly realize that while the pills may have loosened her tongue, they surely didn't create her venom.

Violet's main adversary is her eldest daughter, Barbara, played by Dewey Scott-Wiley. She and Paul Kaufmann (as her husband Bill) are masters of the stage whisper, which they must employ for a marital spat that they desperately wish to remain unheard.  Scott-Wiley expertly depicts this ordinary yet complex character, as we see her first channeling her father in an alcohol-fueled intellectual ramble, then mirroring her mother, attempting in vain to control all around her, while still clad in her nightclothes.

Another standout is Gerald Floyd, as Violet's amiable but long-suffering brother-in-law whom she bitingly notes is now the family patriarch "by default," after her husband's disappearance. In a play where characters often naturalistically talk over one another, timing is everything, and Floyd is the champ, portraying a man who rarely gets a word in edgewise, yet always makes his point known.  Late in the third act, his demand that his wife (played by Elena Martinez-Vidal) show some shred of decency and compassion to their son, was for me perhaps the most moving moment in the play.

Another cast member whose vocal talent must be noted is Ellen Rodillo-Fowler, as the housekeeper Johnna. Brassy and feisty just a few weeks ago in Third Finger, Left Hand, here she plays soft and stoic, often pausing a half-second before most of her lines, and thus showing the depth and thought behind them.  Ron Hale, as Violet's husband, shines in the opening scene, waxing poetic and philosophical while concealing the depths of despair into which he has fallen. Sarah Crouch as the granddaughter Jean, Joe Morales as the local Sheriff, Kevin Bush as the supposed loser cousin "Little" Charles, Erin Wilson as the frustrated, plain-Jane middle daughter, and Robin Gottlieb as the somewhat spoiled youngest daughter who foolishly thinks she has escaped the family cycle, all do fine work, many playing against type.  Stann Gwynn as Gottlieb's fiancé has perhaps the fewest lines, but is memorable for making the audience wonder which is creepier: his interaction with Jean (which quickly moves into "Like to watch gladiator movies?" territory) or his career as a yuppie entrepreneur profiting from the Persian Gulf conflict.

One suspects that just as every great actor must try Hamlet in his youth, Macbeth in middle age and Lear as he gets older, so too must every playwright, Letts included, take a stab at a tragedy of family dysfunction.  August: Osage County presents us with no moral or lesson, but rather portrays people making the choices they must, but then living with the consequences.  I was reminded more than once during the show of a line spoken by Clint Eastwood in the film Gran Torino, about how "the thing that haunts a man most is what he isn't ordered to do."

Critics have called this the first great play of the new century. I'm not so sure I'd quite go that far, but there are certainly echoes of any number of classics:  Lillian Hellman's "little foxes, that spoil the vines," the spectre of substance abuse from A Long Day's Journey Into Night,  the bleak sense of frustration and yearning from  Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Turgenev's A Month in the Country, families coping with long-repressed secrets from Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Ibsen's The Wild Duck,  and a dozen Tennessee Williams works, and the domestic battles in the homes of academics from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and On Golden Pond.   Shoot, stick togas on the Westons and you'd basically have the cursed House of Atreus.  Time will tell if this is the latest retelling of eternal themes from the human experience, or a well-crafted pastiche of those themes, designed as an acting tour-de-force for a talented ensemble.

Either way, it rarely gets better than this if you want to see some of Columbia's finest performers flexing their dramatic muscles in some rich and juicy material. Director Thigpen made a wise choice for his finale, and deftly pulls it all together for a rich and thought-provoking evening at the theatre.

If you're going, note that the show runs a solid three and a half hours, with two intermissions, but it feels like not much more than two. Just be sure to make dinner and babysitter arrangements accordingly.  Call the Trustus Box Office at 254-9732 for ticket information.

~ August Krickel