TALES OF THE LOST FORMICANS
As flies to wanton boys. . . . –King Lear
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I was reminded of Marvin, Ruth, Bessie, Lee, and the others when I saw the new Lifeline Theatre production of Constance Congdon’s play Tales of the Lost Formicans. Like McPherson, Congdon gives us an average American family in an average state of entropy. Dad’s got Alzheimer’s; Mom’s got Dad; and their grown daughter Cathy has got custody of her teenaged son Eric, who’s got serious difficulty adapting to his parents’ divorce. Cathy and Eric have moved in with Mom and Dad for a while.
But where McPherson’s horrors are presented on a shit-happens basis, as inexplicable phenomena, Congdon offers a cleanly reasoned explanation for hers: aliens from outer space. Invisible to all but the audience and their flakiest victims, these otherworldlings in Ray-Bans and lab coats take over the stage every so often–offering lectures on the religious significance of household items, freezing or even rewinding people’s lives, filching wallets. It’s the space creatures who trigger Dad’s terrifying forgetfulness. They hide his coffee; they steal hours from his days, days from his life, words from his vocabulary. In one simultaneously absurd and awful passage, an alien asks Dad for directions, then tries to wipe his memory clean of the encounter by simply wiping his memory clean.
Which makes me sorry that the Lifeline Theatre couldn’t do something stronger with it. As directed by Gregg Mierow, the Lifeline production seems ponderous and flat when it should be crisp, flip, and scary. What might have been posed as a contrast between conventional America and its Bizarro World inversion comes across instead as a contrast between the sentimental parts and the funny parts.
