Much has been written and performed about the horrific Cerberus of American paranoia: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Roy Cohn. Perfect Arrangement, Topher Payne’s sharp, funny, and biting look at the human cost of that trio’s “Lavender Scare” opened at Evolution on Thursday directed by Beth Kattelman.
Perfect Arrangement focuses on long-term State Department operatives Bob Martindale (Frank Barnhart) and Norma Baxter (Sonda Staley). These self-described patriots are the insidious intelligence wing of the Second Red Scare. They’re also homosexuals with Bob married to Norma’s partner, Millie Martindale (Ashley Woodard), and Norma married to Bob’s, Jimmy Baxter (Brent Ries). So when Bob’s boss Theodore Sunderson (Kent Halloran) announces the next iteration of their enforcement will focus on “moral turpitude,” alcoholics, “loose women” and, primarily, homosexuals, at a cocktail party, a chill overtakes the room. Almost worse in the short term, Sunderson’s terrible wife Kitty (Lori Cannon) has decided she needs more girlfriends and trains her sights on Norma and Millie.
Beth Kattelman and her cast understand the close proximity between farce and tragedy. Navigating the tricky, sometimes uneven tone of the material requires understanding everything as a punch line. The greatest pleasures here come in jokes that exaggerate and highlight the absurdities of everyone’s life and the ways we all sell out our best selves. The remarkable performances by Staley and Barnhart dig deep into what happens to true believers when their purity turns on them. And they do it with the grace of Astaire and Rogers and the light affection of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Ries’ Jimmy doesn’t have as much to do but does it with an unforced, likable charm.
As a foil for Staley’s Norma Woodard attacks a life of disappointment with full-throated slapstick. As the only character who had a moment of almost-open freedom, she exposes them to translator Barbara Grant (Danielle Mann). Woodard also gets assigned to parrying Cannon’s Kitty in some of the funniest sequences in the play. Her self-awareness at where she falls in the world and the pecking order of these characters is heartbreaking but played with glinting eyes and not a dash of self-pity.
Mann’s truth-telling outsider is a burst of adrenaline. Mann plays the only character a modern audience can root for and a spoiler for the characters we’ve grown to like and sympathize and does both with ribald exuberance. Halloran’s handful of scenes as Theodore hang like a shadow over the proceedings, implying the full weight of the government in its most vindictive and punitive with subtle, chuckling gestures. Cannon, as close as the piece has to an on-stage villain, holds down Kitty’s cartoony aspects with the ballast of an unshakable loneliness the actor and the audience understand well and the character never well.
Keely Heyl’s set and Dayton Edward Willson’s costumes help set the tone of a ’50s that never quite was, as does Kattelman’s own sound design including nice touches like sitcom music breaking the scenes. Kattelman uses the tight confines of the single set to enforce the artificial boundaries of a three-camera comedy and the close quarters of having a secret. She uses that airlessness to create an infectious combustibility when likeable people have to figure out how to justify horrible things.
This production of Perfect Arrangement finds those sparks of delight in blankets of grey horror but without trivializing how horrible it is.
Perfect Arrangement runs through September 2 with performances at 8:00 p.m Wednesday through Saturday. For tickets and more info, visit evolutiontheatre.org
