Summertime Sizzles

Review: “Summertime” a sizzling sensory experience of love, lust

“Summertime,” now playing at Macgowan Little Theatre through Feb. 7, is the quintessential Charles Mee concoction.

One part piña colada and two parts bordering-psychotic fever dream, the maverick playwright’s kinky-sexy tribute to love and the power of passion is unapologetic and relentless in the way it peels away at each layer of the mystery of what it is to feel and live with an utmost fullness of being.

Whatever that means.

But meaning isn’t important here, as much as simply feeling. If the audience walks away from the theater not so much enlightened, but more awed with a sense of the sublime, then co-directors Mel Shapiro and Brian Kite have succeeded in capturing and conveying the essence of the moment.

On Saturday night, the audience was bemused, often repulsed, but they laughed and roared, some cried and many gasped. And when it was over, there were questions asked and few ready answers. Fuzzy logic reigned, and emotions ran high. Mee, Shapiro and Kite would have had reason to smile.

Not that the playwright was present to witness this triumph of essence over form. Mee called in sick, as the audience was to learn after the show, and the promised Q&A, which would have been a nice way to round off a heady night of high-camp and existential discourse, vanished into the ether. The play, however, was left in good hands.

Shapiro and Kite have mastered an almost instinctual feel for the material, hitting all the right notes in all the right places. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, since both directors have dabbled in Mee on past occasion to notable success, not least Shapiro’s “Big Love,” critics’ darling during its run at Venice’s Pacific Residence Theatre last year.

The plot of “Summertime” is wafer thin. But again, the plot’s not the point. Hence, giving it away is of little consequence — basically, boy meets girl (i.e. James, played by a suitably Chekhovian Michael Pappas, meets Tessa, a polished Julia Willcox, resplendent whether in sweats or lingerie). The problem is the two can’t get it on. More specifically, the problem is Tessa. The poor girl is wrecked with doubt caused in no small part by her weird and wonderfully dysfunctional family and an ensuing cast of family friends and lovers. And, boy, does this family love and lust.

The play is comedy as farce, but also comedy in the Dantean sense of the word. Hence, while the fun in the sun ensues, the subject matter often veers off into the darkest of sunspots. Another way of looking at “Summertime” is to see the play as a series of monologues — essential dots connected by lines of peripheral action. It’s here where practically each and every member of the ensemble takes his or her turn to rule the roost. Even the psychotic pizza delivery guy (Dorian Logan), a multiple-murderer who expounds upon the beauty of self-forgiveness as he teeters on the brink, gets his due. And here, the excellent cast, cliché characters and all, burns brightest.

Kahlil Joseph as the gigolo François, male striptease and all, exuded prodigious presence. Michael Agrusso, a late addition to the action, threatened an almost show-stealing turn as the hilarious German man-child philosopher and would-be lover, Günter.

But if a crown must be bestowed, then it must go to the statuesque, implosively explosive Kourtney Kaas, as Maria, mother to Tessa and blessed deliverer of the mother lode of virtuoso acting.

Played against an exquisite backdrop of delicately framed orange-tinged roses, and a stage sparsely dressed with white muslin-covered pieces of furniture, including a well-tuned baby grand, “Summertime” simmers with the sultry warmth of a Tuscan summer, but plays with all the pace and jagged rhythm of a juiced-up jack-hammer.

Like Chekhov on speed.

Keywords

"mel shapiro" "brian kite" 

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