THEATER REVIEW
“Lasso of Truth”
Grade: B-
Through Oct. 19. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. $20-$25. Synchronicity Theatre (in the Peachtree Pointe complex), 1545 Peachtree St. N.E., Suite 102, Atlanta. 404-484-8636, www.synchrotheatre.com.
Bottom line: More highly pitched than received.
I’m often forced to remind disgruntled readers that I review theater, not theater audiences; otherwise, nine out of 10 shows I saw would get some kind of a rave review to match the obligatory standing ovations they usually receive. Over time (say, my own 20 years on the beat), the more predictably and routinely it happens, the less it really means or matters.
But perhaps I stand corrected, if not exactly in ovation. Although Synchronicity Theatre’s “Lasso of Truth” isn’t completely worthy of raving about, artistic director Rachel May’s ambitious production probably gave and deserved better than it got from a recent, rather sedate matinee crowd of 35 or so.
The company’s fabulous new home (the former Ansley Park Playhouse in Midtown) seats closer to 135, and it wasn’t very long into the performance that I began to wonder how much more titillating the experience might have been with a larger, more audibly responsive audience. Given the dark and naughty comedic pulse of Carson Kreitzer’s play and the flashy visual touches provided by May, it almost felt akin to watching “Rocky Horror” all by your lonesome.
“Lasso” tells the sharply skewed “true” story of William Marston, who, among other claims to fame in the 1930s and ’40s, invented the lie detector and created the comic-book super-heroine Wonder Woman. Privately, his claim to infamy was living with two women, his legal wife and his research assistant, in a ménage a trois driven by kinky bondage and sadomasochistic sex (in any number of combinations).
As dictated by the material, Kevin Stillwell, Tenaya Cleveland and Bryn Striepe portray the love triangle in big, broad strokes — basically as camp, prone to a lot of histrionic mannerisms and posturing, or speaking in melodramatic flourishes like characters from an old TV or radio soap opera (or, indeed, a comic book).
With or without much feedback from my particular audience, the actors are definitely up for the sillier challenges of the piece, and they bravely tackle its shadier scenes, too. All of those high jinks, though, somehow overshadow the meatier observations their characters eventually draw about female equality and rewriting the rules of society, about honesty and openness and creating a Utopia, and about the limits of trust and betrayal.
Meanwhile, in a contemporary “alternate universe,” Matthew Myers and Christen Orr lack a bit of chemistry playing his-and-her Wonder Woman fans — he of her ’40s comics, she of her ’70s TV series — who form a sweetly romantic bond, fueled by occasional discussions about gender hierarchy and pop-culture iconography for good measure.
Under the impressive technical direction of Carter Eastis, “Lasso of Truth” features a fairly dazzling display of bells and whistles, including an inordinate amount of sound cues (engineered by Kristin Von Hinezmeyer and Preston Goodson) and shifts in lighting (designed by Jessica Coale).
Best of all (except for a few cheesy prerecorded sequences involving the character of Gloria Steinem), the video design of Jon Summers and Sarah Pindak projects a breathless barrage of title cards, illustrated comic-book panels and other special effects on several screens positioned around Kat Conley’s platformed set (some of which are more obscured than others, depending on where you’re seated).
The show is a bold undertaking — not entirely successful, but at least as deserving of (and yet deprived of it by the crowd I attended with) the sort of rousing reaction many another production has earned for attempting and achieving considerably less.
