THE PROGENY CHRONICLES
Hope and Nonthings and
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The title character of Scott Sandoe’s Texanna Rearranges the Planets and Saves Your Family From the Gates of Hell–one-half of “The Progeny Chronicles”–is a housewife and mother turned author. Her children didn’t object when she first took up writing, finding it in their own interests to keep her busy and out of the way. Twelve years later, however, Texanna’s advice books have spawned a million-dollar industry encompassing not only book sales but lecture tours, monogrammed souvenirs, and an exercise video. Of course, not all of Texanna’s history conforms to her “mother knows best” image. She claims her husband is deceased, but he’s actually in prison. Her estranged older son, Peter, is a pornographic film star. Her slavishly devoted younger son, Gabriel, is her manager and personal lackey. And her spoiled daughter, Maggie, is a bored mall rat. Peter says that his mother beat him, Gabriel says that his mother neglected him, Maggie says that her mother is smothering her. None of these accusations bothers Texanna, whose money-making manifesto to moms is firmly based on the principles of self-deception, denial, selective memory, and the abandonment of such outmoded maternal sentiments as unconditional love and consideration for others.
Comedic treatment of serious subjects is not new–indeed, it’s the basis of virtually all post-Norman Lear television comedy. But if the contrasting attitudes are not carefully integrated, they tend to cancel each other out. Playwright Sandoe and director Martin de Maat both seem competent, but apparently they have not made up their minds about the response they want these plays, presented by KKT Productions, to invoke. Texanna’s children have some genuine grievances, but their complaints are played so cute and cartoonishly that we can’t take them seriously. “Honestly, children do exaggerate so, don’t they?” laughs Texanna, and because her children are so exaggerated, we almost believe her. After all, in a cartoon nobody ever really gets hurt.
Though the ten actors–mostly students from Columbia College, I’m told–who play the 28 characters in Fragmented Veins are enthusiastic and occasionally inspired, Pierce has strung his narrative together so loosely, as have directors Mark A. Fossen and John R. Pierson, that any plot is obscured until the last 20 minutes or so. Then we finally get a glimpse of the play this could have been, before it developed an accessorizing disorder.
