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‘When Something Wonderful Ends’ @ Express
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B -
It may seem a bit of a stretch to blame the end of the world on Barbie’s Dream Car, a plastic, coral-colored Austin-Healey convertible with sporty wire wheels, circa 1961.
But in her amazingly circuitous autobiographical play, “When Something Wonderful Ends,” Sherry Kramer uses a vast collection of Barbie dolls, clothes and accessories to mourn what she sees as the globe’s fatal dependence on crude oil.
Now playing at Actor’s Express, the 90-minute, one-woman show is a meticulously researched, stunningly digressive account of a writer’s journey from the seeming halcyon days of her youth in Springfield, Mo., to the scary realization that the planet has taken a serious wrong turn.
Directed by Freddie Ashley and starring Vicki Ellis Gray, the play finds Sherry packing up her stash of Barbies in her childhood home (designed by Jon Williamson as a kind of riff on a Barbie dollhouse). Her mother has recently died. America is at war. And Sherry’s grief leads her to reflect on religion, politics and the arc of global history from World War II to the present.
As Sherry sees it, America’s fall from grace began with “The Golden Gimmick” of 1950, when the Truman administration created artificially cheap gas by giving tax breaks to the petroleum industry — and became enmeshed in a game of political chess aimed at protecting oil-rich Saudi Arabia from its foes. As the planet runs out of oil, Sherry reasons apocalyptically, “petrochemically addicted countries” will start to behave like drug addicts — committing acts of criminal aggression to get a fix.
Interlacing personal reflections about her Jewish faith with thoughts on her Mom’s favorite confection (Brach’s Hard Cinnamon Candy), Beatles nostalgia and the time she spent at an artist colony where the real-life Barbie (Barbara Handler) once lived, the playwright delivers a bristling but clear-eyed call for change. Seeing a military funeral for a U.S. solider killed in Iraq, her agenda crystalizes with the thought that America might have been better served developing alternative fuels than spending a fortune protecting the Middle East.
As Sherry points out about Reform Judaism, there’s no promise of any kind of afterlife. For all we know, this is it. We make the choice —heaven or hell. Phew. And you thought this was just a memory-soaked discourse on John Lennon’s “All You Need is Love” and Barbie outfits with names like “Enchanted Evening.”
While Gray gives a solid reading of the long, intellectually complicated play, her approach relies a bit too much on the crisp efficiency of an infomercial voiceover than the sorrowful reflections of a soul-sick woman. You can’t help but wish for a little more comedic spark, irony and variety in the actress’ movement vocabulary.
At the end of her long and winding road of personal and political discovery, Sherry sheepishly confesses that she drives an SUV. But you get the impression that it will soon be in the same for-sale pile as Barbie’s Dream Car.
A hit at last year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays and smartly timed to this presidential election year, “When Something Wonderful Ends” is about taking responsibility — one vote, one voice and one vehicle at a time.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Through April 12. $16-$27. Actor’s Express, King Plow Arts Center, 887 West Marietta St., Suite J-107, Atlanta. 404-607-7469, actors-express.com
Bottom line: A playwright outgrows her Barbie collection, and ruminates on world crisis and responsibility.
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