AMERICAN NOTES
Maybe you saw Jenkin’s lurid Gogol at Blind Parrot Productions, back in 1987. Or maybe you made the trek to Theatre X in Milwaukee last month, for the premiere of his gleefully vicious Poor Folk’s Pleasure. If you did, you know Jenkin’s not the winsome type. His narratives are all broken up into jagged little shards; his characters tend toward the sick, the cynical, the twisted, and the ugly. He’s got a quirky, half-morbid/half-vulgar sense of the mystic, and his notion of human nature is not what you’d call positive: Gogol wallows in decadence and deceit, while Poor Folk’s Pleasure celebrates all that’s stunted, brain-dead, and malign in America’s lumpen life-style.
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This is a vision Menendian and company either don’t know about or can’t express. Menendian ignores the mercantile aspect and treats Jenkin’s characters as your basic collection of wounded souls looking for a little comfort in an unfeeling world. Which is not only wrongheaded but dull. Denied their nastier possibilities, their subversive undertones, the passages involving the drifter and the motel clerk come across sounding like highlights from The Rainmaker; and poor Chuckles simply loses his reason for being–despite superior work in the role by Dan Shea.
