THE ICE FISHING PLAY
Organic Theater Company
Thankfully the rest of us are allowed to live in a more or less blissful state of ignorance. Which may be one reason so many plays–from Oedipus Rex to King Lear to Krapp’s Last Tape–revolve around people being forced to admit some nasty truth about themselves. There’s something fascinating about watching others do onstage what we do so reluctantly in our own private lives.
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As in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the humor here is meant to throw the serious side of the story into sharper relief. But Kling’s comedy rarely inspires more than a quiet smile. His send-up of rural characters and their foibles is so mild it makes the toothless Greater Tuna seem biting satire.
Nothing in In Pact Theatre’s production makes up for Kling’s emotional coldness–in fact, the production’s tentativeness complements the play’s. In the passive lead, Gerry Daly fails completely to give Ron a third dimension. He remains on the stage what he is on the page–a cipher with a Minnesota accent. Likewise Brian Worrall and Pepper Stebbins’s cartoonish takes on the visiting evangelists drain all the humor from this archetypal pair of fools.
With so many twists in the plot, no wonder it’s hard to tell who the main character is. Early on, the protagonist seems to be the daughter. Halfway through, it becomes clear that the schlemiel of a deprogrammer is meant to take center stage, a place for which he is as ill suited as he is to his employment. Possibly a stronger actor in the role would have dominated the play earlier. But I doubt it. Corbett’s heavy-handed character development and his tin ear guarantee that even a potentially compelling character like Fisher lacks credibility. And Richard Shavzin just doesn’t have the charisma or comic range to make this complex, confused character believable.
Since that time Pearson has performed the work around the United States and Canada and now has returned for an engagement at Wisdom Bridge. I wish I could report that years of performing Diary of a Madman have deepened Pearson’s understanding of Aksenty Ivonov Poprishchin and transformed what was a wonderful show (I liked it so much I saw it twice at the Prop and once at the Abbie Hoffman Festival) into an excellent one.
