ADVERTISEMENT

    Theatre Review: Haberdasher’s The Maderati is a Promising but Fatally Flawed Debut

    Richard Greenberg is one of the most acclaimed and produced playwrights of the last 20 years both on Broadway and off. It’s a bold move for Haberdasher Theatre Inc’s first Columbus show to produce his early work The Maderati. I’m sorry to say it works better as a shot across the bow than as a show to watch and enjoy, primarily because the material has not aged well and wasn’t fully baked to start with.

    ADVERTISEMENT

    The Maderati opens with Rena Debutts (Ellie Rogers) and Chuck Debutts (Zach Lyon) waking up and piecing together their recollections of the night before through the golden haze of a hangover. More than that, they’re hitting the moment when fatigue sets in, of being the adults – more than once, Chuck is referred to as unflappable – holding their stunted community of would be or struggling artists together. But before they get to really dissect that, the phone is ringing and there’s another tragedy – one of the guests at the party has been committed to a mental ward. They make a phone call to Ritt Overlander (Billy DePetro) and Dewey Overlander (Colleen Dunne) who are working through an exaggerated pantomime of a struggling marriage. The Overlanders are so overwhelmed by their own issues they don’t let the sentence end: they assume the guest, Charlotte Ebbinger, is dead. Along three tracks they go to try to help – Rena’s quest to get Charlotte out of the hospital – to cushion – Chuck’s search to rally friends but also soften what’s happened – and create drama – the Overlanders’ manic search for distraction through the same friends.

    That opening is electric and rich with promise. Rena’s struggle with image, she goes through three outfits before being satisfied enough to go check her friend out of the hospital, and her saying things like “Last night the glitterati were thick as porterhouse steaks,” then immediately writing them down, and Chuck’s more existential questioning are sharply delineated and point to a jewel box satire. Not material we haven’t seen before, but done in a fresh, funny way, and those two, particularly Ellie Rogers’ Rena Debutts, are characters I could have happily spent an hour and a half with. Unfortunately, they barely register throughout the rest of the play until a too-neat denouement. Without their counterbalancing weight, the play dissolves into hollow, exaggerated schtick with accents that frequently vanish from sentence to sentence. The puncturing of the self-satisfied pretention of a B-list, joyless art scene is full of rich material but never exploits it as the play dissolves into cartoony caricature – worst in scenes like a too-long offstage mugging and its aftermath which should be a turning point for the Overlanders but is most memorable for a burst of racism as Ritt describes his mugger as referring to Dewey’s camera as a “flash-flash” and leaving out articles in the sentence, as though he was mugged by The Incredible Hulk.

    In the second act, the lies start to come home to roost with the introduction of both Charlotte Ebbinger (an electrifying Anne Catherine McAlpine), the source of the drama, and Danton Young (a very funny Brock Perkins) a serial philandering actor at the core of the Overlanders martial problems. Unfortunately, starting at this point the play also sags under it sudden desire to reach for a more profound philosophical point it doesn’t overcome its muddled thinking to quite get to – there’s something about love, there are a handful of hazy platitudes dancing around authenticity, but it never quite figures out its targets or how it wants to attack. Most criminally, when big laughs have been set up it gets pedantic and preachy and it’s long – for a satire of such well-trod ground, two acts in two hours is exhausting.

    Surrounding the weak connective tissue of the play is a good production with a few flaws but a lot to recommend. Beyond Ellie Rogers’ fantastic Rena and Zach Lyon’s rock solid Chuck, many of the performances are a marvel in commitment and focus. Colleen Dunne takes the bag of cliches Dewy Overlander could have been and walks the razor’s edge with it, often using only a subtle change of inflection and a raised eyebrow she finds something consistent and consistently funny in the unevenness. Michael Fernando Carozza’s closeted alcoholic editor and publisher Martin Royale has whipcrack timing, like the Debutts’, hints at the fun, cutting satire this play could have been.

    A play with this many short scenes and quick changes is a logistical challenge in the small confines of MadLab and with the limited budget those changes take longer than is ideal, but the sets, designed by Althea Yiesley and constructed by Robert Klem and Jesse Luketic,  are fantastic, planting us in the ’80s Manhattan milieu of the play without undue underlining. The costumes also work very well. Hollie Klem’s direction is generally quite good, she understands the rhythms of the scenes even when the play doesn’t always and she brings an interesting, anarchic voice that Columbus theatre can always use more of.

    While I can’t recommend The Maderati, I found parts of it fascinating and several of the performances will stick with me for quite some time. It left me wanting, very much, to see what Haberdasher bring to our stages next.

    The Maderati runs through September 26 with shows at 8:00pm Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, please visit http://www.haberdashertheatre.com/

     

     

    ADVERTISEMENT

    Subscribe

    More to Explore:

    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
    ADVERTISEMENT