Sunday, March 26, 2000
Performers make most of 'Dead-Eye'
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
On any give night on network news you might find a story about kids doing incomprehensible damage. If it's not Columbine, it's a first-grader bringing a gun to school and shooting a classmate.
For anyone who has managed to develop intellectual scar tissue in order to take in the news of the day and stay sane, The Dead-Eye Boy, this year's Rosenthal New Play Prize winner at Playhouse in the Park, is here to rip it off. Sitting in the audience is like witnessing a two-hour train wreck. Instead of mangled bodies, it's mangled lives.
Sustaining that shocked response for that length of time (plus intermission) is no small thing. Director Charles Towers has filled the Shelterhouse with some remarkable, intimate theatrical art in shows such as Nixon's Nixon and How I Learned to Drive. He does it again with Dead-Eye Boy. He creates a deadly urgency and pulls a huge performance from Raye Lankford and a subtler, quietly effective one from Kyle Fabel.
Playwright Angus MacLachlan was inspired by a real incident in writing his drama about a deeply dysfunctional mother (Ms. Lankford). her son (Dan McCabe, the Dead-Eye Boy of the title) and the loser-with-dreams-of-something-better (Mr. Fabel) who comes into their lives.
In all honesty, Dead-Eye Boy isn't that good a play. The characters are who they are — ignorant, low-income, abused and abusive.
Mr. MacLachlan offers a dramatic snapshot rather than the theatrical interpretation of American Beauty or Magnolia. These films have concerned themselves, to some degree, with the same themes: screwed-up families; a man looking for a way out of a self-built trap.
In Dead-Eye Boy,there's no growth, no insights. We're not invested in these lives. Mr. MacLachlan makes a feeble attempt at a redemptive ending with a ludicrous, feel-good tag-on final scene. It's hard to believe nobody cut it during rehearsals.
When we meet Soren, he's 14 and already torturing animals and talking about blowing people away. He's a Jeffrey Dahmer-in-waiting.
His mother, when she's clean, is in denial. She won't acknowledge the past much less learn from it. Flashback scenes illuminate agonizing emotional and physical abuse that turned the kid into a cringing animal who seeks more abuse and bites back.
She meets her new husband at an AA meeting. He's a mess but compassionate, seeing too much of himself in the kid. He is wrong.
At its best, Dead-Eye Boy is a structure on which to hang stunning performances. For everyone who remembers Ms. Lankford in the title role of Sylvia, be astonished at her range. Here she's Shirley-Diane, a worn, emaciated, dark-rooted blonde, needy and mean. Shirley-Diane thinks she's evil, but she's nothing that big.
Mr. Fabel does quiet desperation beautifully, although he's not given as much support as he needs from the script. Mr. McCabe does well in what feels like the confines of a stereotyped role. Allthree characters have that stereotype mental stamp until we remind ourselves of the nightly news.
Fight director Drew Fracher does outstanding work, although when the action peaks, Mr. McCabe didn't pitch himself into it with the energy and fearless abandon of his co-stars.
The Dead-Eye Boy, through April 16, Playhouse in the Park Shelterhouse, 421-3888.
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