OF ALL THE WIDE TORSOS IN ALL THE WILD GLEN
Paul Peditto’s Of All the Wide Torsos begins with morosely poetic, quasi-religious meanderings on a taped voice-over as the play’s protagonist reluctantly enters the inner sanctum of a liposuction specialist, like a penitent sinner visiting the local church-approved torturer. Our hero is Maxwell Gibbs, an overweight and overwrought playwright whose succession of flops has driven him to feeding fits. As he sits in the doctor’s waiting room, listening to the hideous sucking sounds emanating from the operating room as one might have listened to groans from the rack in the days of the Inquisition, Gibbs launches into a waspish and self-pitying tirade against critics, audiences, and the “quack” psychiatrist who has referred him for liposuction (a better body being the doorway to psychic health, the reasoning goes). Outfitted with a rasping Dixie drawl and a collection of jerky, flap-wristed hand gestures, Gibbs appears to us as a southern-gothic gay in the Tennessee Williams mold; but that’s apparently a matter of imperfect acting and direction, as Peditto’s script draws Gibbs into a psychosexual standoff with the doctor’s young, efficient, relentlessly vigorous female nurse. She tries to coax Gibbs out of his recalcitrance by flaunting her fit form in a quickie workout session (to the rhythms of a dance-rock tape by the Fat Boys, for that extra edge of humiliation). Peditto builds the friction between Nurse Hastings’s energy and Gibbs’s anxiety to a farcical crescendo that involves a noisy pratfall and a furious chase around a desk before sending the paunchy playwright off to meet his remaker.
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Anello also shows up in Craig Bradshaw’s aimless staging of The Panhandlers, playing the apprentice, a very different character with the same annoying hand gestures; this isn’t a style, it’s a bad habit, and I can’t believe it went unchecked by two directors. As the professor, Danne Taylor cuts a rakish figure in his beatup overcoat and his long ponytail; but his effete attitude only scratches the surface of his initially appealing, ultimately appalling character. Kerry Reid is far too bland as the streetwalker whose passiveness gives way to a sudden burst of coldhearted aggressiveness. In a bare-bones production such as this, clarity of intent in the acting and the blocking is essential; these two plays seem to have been thrown together in the directors’ spare time.
