DR. SPRAY
Dr. Spray, Marc Smith’s rather abbreviated one-man show, concerns the once-notorious turn-of-the-century rogue, coroner, and alienist. A member of Chicago’s notorious Whitechapel Club, founded in the late 1880s by the likes of Peter Finley Dunne and George Ade, Spray is best known as the man who supplied the club with what some described as “the finest collection of skulls in the country,” many of which had been made into gas lamps. (The club also sported a coffin that doubled as a table, the mummified head of an Indian princess, and walls decorated with all manner of “swords, dirks, rifles and derringers.”) Dr. Spray, in the words of a contemporary, was “himself a startling sight,” with shoulder-length blond hair and an equally long mustache, the ends of which “brushed his coat lapels.”
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Though Dr. Spray is not yet fully realized, it may in the fullness of time turn into something worthwhile. In the meantime Smith, best known as the founder and biggest booster of the poetry-slam movement, certainly looks the part in a seedy black jacket and rumpled white shirt and wearing his long brown hair, normally tied back in a ponytail, loose over his face. His performance, however, is less than satisfying.
Rick Almada’s The Third Planet Earth begins with a bang–a loud recorded explosion accompanied by a handful of screaming actors, some in period costume, careening across the stage–and finishes with an hour-long whimper. Griffin Theatre Company’s current late-night offering is a grimly unfunny sci-fi comedy that takes place on a parallel planet earth–not, as the author takes pains to explain in the prologue, the somewhat better known parallel world of bad sci-fi movies and old Superman comics but a “third planet earth.” Like the other parallel earth, it’s almost exactly like our own. This distinction without a difference doesn’t change Almada’s often aimless story, but it does speak volumes about the playwright’s tendency to get lost in the details–the pseudoscientific explanations, the nifty sci-fi devices, including a nickelodeon that allows people to see their past lives.
Every writer I know has at least one work, usually an early effort, that doesn’t make the grade. What a shame Almada didn’t find a suitable drawer for The Third Planet Earth.
