HAIR OF THE DOG
At its heart Thomas Arthur Repp’s Hair of the Dog, in its midwest premiere at the Avenue Theatre, is a simple, endearing melodrama of cockeyed redemption. Bones is a former music teacher who lost his job after slamming a kid’s hands in a piano when he was on a drunk. Now in his late 40s, he heads a rum-running gang during Prohibition from a ramshackle house across the river from the Canadian border: he and his motley crew of smugglers pose as dog breeders to smuggle booze in dog-food cans into the States. But his cover is threatened when the two dogs he keeps for breeding refuse to mate. In an interesting twist, the dogs are played by humans, and though we can understand them, they only bewilder and aggravate Bones. The female, Uno, is in heat and all too willing, but Dono, the male, is interested only in knocking over the lawn ornaments of a neighbor, Choo Choo, a pretty, kooky stripper who’s obviously crazy about Bones. Unfortunately Bones, like his dog, has his mind on other things.
