Harvestide
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These comic book-ish characters come with Serpas’s pomo turf, however: the high-art recasting of distinctly subliterary genres–science fiction, B movies, detective novels, mystery thrillers. And despite Angeline’s sexist ways, she was also a fascinating creature, full of enough tricks and surprises to keep her interesting even when Serpas’s story telling flagged: ironically enough, what was lacking in Dogtown and Green Air was the very thing most pulp has in spades–a story strong enough to grab an audience and keep it.
But in Harvestide, Serpas’s latest play, he has a story, and he sticks to it, more or less, from beginning to end. He doesn’t have much choice. The genre he’s plundering this time is detective fiction, in which the (often formulaic) story is so tightly bound to the stock characters that as soon as you start introducing, say, the down-on-his-luck detective, the dame who falls for him and turns out to be enmeshed in the crime, or his former friend at the police station you automatically have plot twists.
Sadly, Serpas still doesn’t know when to stop. Long after he should have let his story play itself out he’s still adding strange characters and plot twists, until halfway through the second act his story (and the audience) collapses out of sheer exhaustion. In this way Harvestide is closer to Pedro Almodovar’s more annoying recent films, like Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, than to his wonderfully funny, perverse farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. We watch the last 15 minutes of Harvestide without enjoyment or belief. We only wait, as we waited in Dogtown and Green Air, for the mess to end so we can go home.
