NATIVE SPEECH
Tight & Shiny Productions at At the Gallery-Chopin Theatre
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So Tight & Shiny Productions have certainly given themselves an enormous challenge. Brett A. Snodgrass’s beautifully decaying set is the perfect environment for this play: an enormous slab of concrete floats in the center of an empty black stage. Out of this concrete shoot two steel beams, perhaps 15 feet high, reaching futilely toward nothing (the ceiling of the space is probably 30 feet). On this postindustrial island Hungry Mother’s studio is stranded, littered with old 45s, radio equipment, and various other debris.
The combination of clutter and clarity seems particularly apt. While the play is full of shrapnel from Overmyer’s explosive imagination, each shard is precisely cut to be lethal. From one of Hungry Mother’s news flashes: “Police today busted a waterfront distillery, arresting 27 adults. The distillery produces a wine brewed from the sores of children, which is quite popular locally and in the contiguous states, and is easily available without a prescription.” And Snodgrass’s choice of concrete and steel–the city’s literal building blocks–underscores Overmyer’s interest in society’s crumbling underpinnings.
The Great American Cheese Sandwich is a rather insubstantial family satire by Burton Cohen given a gung-ho production by Close Call Theatre. This one-act presents the “all-American” family: Father (Michael Kingston) the breadwinner, Mother (Kathleen Salois) the distraught homemaker, son Tom (Ray Brazaski) the high school football star, and daughter Betsy (Susan Gaspar) the pretty young thing. However, a few things in this family are slightly off kilter. Betsy runs some kind of outlaw ring in China and is pregnant, and Tom wears a dress and is having an affair with his coach. Mother and Father remain blissfully unaware of these curiosities.
