TWO ORIGINAL ONE-ACTS: “THE SPIDER” AND “CUE LINE”
at Sheffield’s School Street Cafe
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Cue Line, by actor John Farrimond, at first recalls a Second City improv exercise: whenever a new actor entered a scene the setting was switched and the story enlarged, creating a progressively more populous sketch. But unfortunately Cue Line doesn’t get bigger–this one-joke sketch just pursues the same path Pirandello charted seven decades ago, though he had much more to say, in Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here there are only three characters (played by Dean Dedes, Stephanie Manglaras, and Farrimond), who flounder around, waiting in Beckettian fashion for cues that never come and tormenting themselves with tedious accusations and impish assaults on each other.
The short curtain raiser, Bradley Jefferson’s The Spider, is a sinister puzzler: an old woman (Lea Tolub) is confronted by a young man (Farrimond) who pretends to be a pizza deliveryman. He is in fact the illegitimate son of her dead husband, here to avenge his father’s murder. Pulling out a revolver, she turns the tables and equalizes the menace–and, boringly, that’s just how the sketch ends.
The craziest offering is Mark O’Donnell’s Marred Bliss, a silly depiction of the awkward meeting between an engaged couple and their envious exes. The joke is that everyone speaks in Freudian malapropisms and spoonerisms, like “foul airs” for “flowers” and “conglomerations” for “congratulations.” Clearly O’Donnell is able to toss these off in his sleep: “We’ve been enraged for a year,” “Fantasy seething you here,” “My shit is in rancor in the harbor and they gave me whore leave,” “How’s the nervy?” “I was born to be a soiler,” and “At least I’m not diddled with funereal disease.”
