GLEN? OR GLENDA?
at Live Bait Theater
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Glen? Or Glenda?, Interplay’s current late-night offering, is strikingly similar in concept and execution, if not tone, to Some Mo’ Productions’ late-night hit of a year ago, Reefer Madness. That show’s adapter and director Sean Abley, stealing a page from Jill and Faith Soloway’s Real Live Brady Bunch, created a comedy hit by merely having his actors act out verbatim the cult antireefer documentary. Now Andrew J. Dahlman and Rob MacDonald have taken the very odd exploitation film Glen or Glenda? and translated it verbatim to the stage, but with considerably less success. Part of the problem is that Glen or Glenda? is a far more complex and contradictory film than the rather obvious Reefer Madness, and so demands something far more radical than a camped-up word-for-word adaptation.
In translating Glen or Glenda? to the stage, Dahlman and MacDonald (and director Michael Wexler) remain true to the letter of Wood’s work–a good 98 percent of the dialogue comes straight from the film. But they completely miss its spirit. They never seem to have decided whether they were creating an homage to Wood’s inspired lunacy or a send-up of his awkward filmmaking. So they do both, sometimes reproducing Wood’s painful sincerity (as in Ken Bradley’s sympathetic portrayal of Glen/Glenda) and other times camping up his story outrageously (as when Glen’s mother and the nurse at the psychiatrist’s office are played by men in drag).
The obvious message is that the quaint innocence of Northeast Central West High School is about to end. However, the mild irony of Laura, Johnny, and Barbara Ann going frantic over a dance we know will be canceled because of Kennedy’s death is not enough to redeem this evening’s worth of old jokes and cliches. After Grease, American Graffiti, and ten years–God help us–of Happy Days, do we really need to see another superficial comedy about adolescence in the late 50s and early 60s?
