BIGFEET
During the 80s Royce stopped acting. She wrote movie-of-the-week scripts and projects for such corporate clients as Quaker Oats, McDonald’s, AT&T, and Allstate. She was the quintessential woman of the 80s: a high-powered, dress-for-success baby boomer.
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Judging from the stories she tells in Bigfeet, as Royce makes her transition into the 90s the catch phrase will be “messed-up but still hoping.” In this rambling yet somewhat cohesive one-woman show, Royce tells about all the depressing and downright stupid relationships she’s been in lately. Her saga begins with Edmund, a 26-year-old African American comedian with whom she dreamed of “changing the biases of the world through comedy,” and dances through a love affair with Max, an artist who loved women’s clothing, and ends with Ivan, who she meets when she’s hired to direct a documentary about Bigfoot.
The writing indicates that these are humorous exaggerations of incidents in Royce’s recent past, but it’s never clear onstage because Royce-the-actor does such a flimsy job of portraying them. If I were Royce-the-writer I’d be pretty mad at an actor who did so little justice to my script. Blame it on rusty performance skills, a lack of character analysis, or uncontrollable stage jitters, but Royce’s delivery of the funny lines she’s written for herself somehow comes off as sad rather than funny. Though she has an attractive persona and strong stage presence, Royce seems too embroiled in these situations to give her lines the spin they need. She’s written a funny and genuinely engaging script, but as an actress seems unable to do her work justice.
