John Kolvenbach’s Fabuloso, currently
closing out Third Rail Repertory’s first season at the World Trade
Center, is a rompy little domestic fable depicting the lifestyle clash
of two very different couples. Like an inversion of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?—complete with rapacious boozing and nonsense
nursery rhymes—Fabuloso posits not that conventional
relationships are fundamentally hollow, but that they’re fundamentally
unfun.
Hangdog Teddy (Philip Cuomo) and his overbearing wife Kate
(Stephanie Gaslin) serve here as the sign bearers of conventionality,
acting out scenes of depressing domestic tedium that revolve around
Teddy’s job as a girls’ soccer coach. Kate, whose beige-and-black
outfits match her blandly neutral living room, tries to bully a spark
out of Teddy, but he doesn’t perk up until he receives the unexpected
word that his dear childhood friend Arthur is coming to visit.
Arthur (Tim True) and his unhinged fiancée Samantha (Valerie
Stevens) are like ambassadors from the Land of Make Believe, two adults
who play elaborate games of pretend with the deadly seriousness of
children. Whether playing at murder, playing dead, or playing—in
one of the show’s most memorable scenes—at being dancers in
Fame, the two live life at an exhausting pitch, ever-craving new
kinds of stimulation. This generates ample tension between Samantha and
Arthur’s high-wire antics and the comforting domestic drear to which
Kate in particular longs to return—especially when it appears
that Arthur and Samantha plan on staying for good.
Valerie Stevens is one of the most fearless performers in Portland,
and here she flings herself into the comedic stratosphere with nary a
thought for a safety net. Stevens and Tim True are as good as local
actors get, and it’s a genuine pleasure to watch them inhabit and
humanize characters that, in less capable hands, could have quickly
dissipated into caricature. Philip Cuomo and Stephanie Gaslin are
better than their material—Kolvenbach’s script devotes more stage
time to songs and silliness than to plumbing its characters’ emotional
depths, but Cuomo’s Teddy brightens in skillful increments as the show
progresses, while Gaslin mercifully loses her character’s more strident
overtones. By show’s end, the two once-dissatisfied lovers have
softened into characters who appear to genuinely like one another.
There’s much to recommend about this production—why, then,
does it rank among one of this fine company’s weakest offerings?
Momentum has a lot to do with it. Fabuloso benefits not a bit
from leisurely interludes between scenes—during each scene
change, Seinfeld-esque music pops, colored lights suffuse the
stage, and stagehands fussily reshuffle chairs. Momentum all the while
leaks out the cracks, leaving the audience an unwelcome amount of time
to ponder just what it all means. These frequent, labored scene changes
are the theatrical equivalent of yelling “car” every 10 minutes,
relegating games to the sidewalk while the grownups take care of
practical matters.
It doesn’t help that Kolvenbach’s script, while heavy on silliness,
scrimps on the emotional ballast. It’s fun to watch these characters
learning to have fun, but the play’s loopiness seems entirely
self-contained, with little bearing on life outside the theater. Given
a goofball script and direction that stalls any sense of urgency, the
good-hearted Fabuloso is less rewarding than the Third Rail’s
customarily sophisticated productions.