 |
| Brian Hinds and Beth Tantanella in Kate Fodor's RX. Photo – The Bard's Town. |
RX
Written by Kate Fodor
Directed by Tad Chitwood
Review by Keith Waits
Entire contents are copyright © 2013 Keith Waits. All
rights reserved.
Kate Fodor’s RX
is a very funny play, a sharp, satirical examination of human frailty and the
value of a pharmacological response to emotional instability.
Meena Pieroti is unhappy in her job as Managing Editor of
American Cattle and Swine magazine, and so she enlists in a drug trial for
SP925, which is designed to make you happy in your job. This is such a simple
idea but one that immediately resonates in a world in which making a living
doing something you truly love seems a luxury only Hollywood movie stars can
claim. Her monitoring physician is Dr. Phil Gray, a somewhat phlegmatic soul
who soon finds himself in love with Meena. This complicates things in ways both
obvious and unexpected but almost always hilarious.
The interaction that both characters have with new pharmaceuticals
clearly indicates a position of mistrust of big pharmaceutical companies and
their dependency on our dependency on their product. At one point the executive
in charge of the SP925 trial decries a new drug that cures heartbreak because
once you meet “the next blonde” the patient would cease taking the drug. But
SP925 is a keeper – a pill that the vast majority of Americans would “take
every day for the rest of their lives.”
Yet the playwright has more on her mind than a biting
satire of the drug industry. The shifting dynamics of relationships among the
five characters target modern human insecurities. Meena cries twice a day by
escaping to the ladies lingerie section of a neighboring department store,
where she is certain her coworkers will never discover her among the “granny
panties”; while Dr. Gray falls apart from heartbreak and recklessly indulges in
some uncertain pills offered up by a sloppy colleague.
Before it’s done, the play surprises by injecting hope
and idealism into its pessimistic core. At the end of the day, it balances a
detailed and knowing attack on an industry whose integrity has come into
question often in recent years with an engaging romance that is also
characterized by a nutty mix of personality quirks from all sides. The
characters’ idiosyncrasies are there from the start, but love pushes them to
new levels of absurdity.
Director Tad Chitwood has a great ensemble to work with
and leads them into fresh territory. As Meena, Beth Tantanella delivers the
best work I have seen from her – a character built with specificity and
grounded in a core of emotional fragility that gives the comic complications a
nice sense of pathos. We laugh but are also worried for her. Brian Hinds allows
his delicious dead pan delivery to make sense as a gauge of how constrained his
Dr. Phil Gray is and how desperately he needs to break out. Between them, these
two actors make us feel the worth of emotional messiness. Susan Linville makes
a welcome return to the stage as the corporate overseer of the trial, first
fierce and demanding, later a bundle of insecurity when her world begins to
crumble. Everyone in this play is fragile, including the tough business woman.
Laurene Scalf brings a delightfully distracted quality to an older woman who Meena
befriends in that “granny panties” lingerie section; while Michael Roberts
shows interesting new colors in his work as the frazzled medical colleague who
too freely offers samples; and Andy Epstein is low-key onstage but has a
particularly hilarious moment offstage that you need to see (or hear) for
yourself.
As funny as it, it is the way RX sneakily inserts honest truths and penetrating observations
about the human condition that makes you take this play home with you. We wind
up feeling deeply for Meena and Phil, and perhaps only realize just how deeply
after the drive home from the theatre.
RX
October 24-27 and 31, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.
November 1, 2, 2013, at 7:30 p.m.
The Bard’s Town
1801 Bardstown Road
Louisville, KY 40205
502-749-5275
No comments:
Post a Comment