AS THE BEAVER
Zebra Crossing Theatre at the Avenue Theatre
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Soon after the play starts, Johnson begins raising the stakes–making Beaver gay is a mischievous but not especially adventurous first step. It takes an inspired writer to keep pushing the limits of his premise–to the point where comedy turns into tragicomedy, and mild joshing into astringent satire. It isn’t that Johnson’s comedy is solemn–far from it. The play is often hilarious, thanks in part to the playwright’s great ear for formulaic sitcom dialogue (if I didn’t know better, I might think whole passages of As the Beaver were lifted verbatim from reruns).
What makes the play more than just another example of baby-boomer boob-tube worship is Johnson’s recognition of the darker sides of these TV characters’ personalities and therefore of the more poignant sides of their stories. When Beaver is caught in a compromising position with Little Ricky, it provokes crises in both the Cleaver and Ricardo households, but the Cleavers implode and the Ricardos explode. June Cleaver, attuned to the then-current pop-psych attitude that strong-willed women turn their sons into homosexuals, blames herself. Beaver too is racked by self-loathing, which leads to a suicide attempt. Meanwhile Lucy wails, and Ricky, bursting with wounded machismo, severely beats Little Ricky, then packs him off to a Cuban military school. Yet Ricky Ricardo doesn’t come off as simply a violence-prone hothead father but as a man whose strict code of acceptable male behavior has totally alienated him from his hysterical wife and depressive son.
What a joy that this terrific cast was given such a fine script. And vice versa.
The only worthwhile thing in this whole misbegotten mess is Stephanie Nelson’s clever, eye-pleasing, cartoonish set. Even that would have been better suited to a broader, more absurdist work–say Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano or Albee’s The American Dream–than to Shawn’s quiet, more or less naturalistic, extremely pessimistic comedy.
