 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Nothing to fear in six takesBy PETER SMITH
© St. Petersburg Times, What's scary? Well, everybody has a Room 101, as George Orwell put it in 1984. But if you are scared by the six sketches presented in The Nature of Fear and Its Effects: A Lecture by Professor Templeton Q. Westlake, the odds are you don't get out much. The 2001 edition of the Jobsite Theater's Original Works series has some chilling moments. But the overall effect is a little like being locked in a closet with Rod Serling after a double espresso. The best sketches are the funny ones. Horror is simply too hard a nut to crack in 10 minutes. All the playlets are about death. If you want to get an audience's attention, this is the way to go, but for the plays' diversity, the same note is being struck over and over. Death just isn't that scary. It happens to everyone. The evening is narrated by Shawn Paonessa as professor Templeton. He is genuinely funny in his introductions and the evening's denouement. In The Body, by Steve Patterson, a doctor working in a morgue is faced with a corpse that resembles his dead wife and talks to him. In the immortal words of SCTV's Count Floyd, "Oooh, scary stuff, kids." A Touch of Sun, by Warner D. Conarton, has some slapstick laughs as a vampire tries to cope with a modern hospital. Jason Evans is delightfully silly as the vampire. But all the playlets are silly. Except one. Dancer, a tale of erotic obsession, might be the only genuinely chilling moment as Matt Lundsford takes Matt Creager's words and draws us into his madness. C.H.D. McBride's Graveyard Shift With Clive takes the attitude toward death that makes the most sense: There it is; deal with it or don't. Leah LoSchiavo as Clive is funny in this Pythonesque sketch. Casa Diablo, by Michael Olson, wants us to feel bad for a child molester captured by a now-grown woman he tormented. The premise is too hard to make, although Shannon Armstrong howls in anguish admirably, and Ami Sallee Corley as the molested woman is convincing. Breathing Oblivion, the longest sketch of the evening, by Neil Gobioff and Paonessa, is nonsensical, unless you believe in angels and that they can go insane. If you believe, the question might be interesting, but if you don't, it's just a way to handle the randomness of life. The play says nothing about the nature of reality as we know it. But Mark Trent as the crazy Jude is compelling until you think about it. In short, not scary, not very funny and not really interesting. Nice try, though. Theater reviewThe Jobsite Theater's The Nature of Fear and Its Effects: A Lecture by Professor Templeton Q. Westlake, through Sept. 2 at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Shimberg Playhouse, 1010 N W.C. MacInnes Place, Tampa. 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday. $15 ($12 with student ID). (813) 229-7827.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the wire |
