With all due respect for the many indisputable demonstrations of Melissa Foulger’s directorial skill over the years, nobody’s perfect.
Longtime audiences of Actor's Express, where she frequently works as an associate artist, will likely remember her consummate work there on "Suddenly, Last Summer," "Good Boys and True," "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," or several original plays by former Atlantan Steve Yockey. For the most part, however, the lasting impression of Foulger's latest Express effort is that rowdy sex comedies might not be her forte.
The show is a premiere production of "The Flower Room," penned by another up-and-coming local playwright: Daryl Lisa Fazio, whose earlier credits include the rural drama "Split in Three" and the supernatural "Freed Spirits" (previously staged at Aurora and Horizon, respectively, but both of which I missed).
Ingrid Alvin (Stacy Melich) is a curiously repressed “sex anthropologist” — and recently unemployed college professor. After she’s embroiled in a vaguely detailed sex-for-grades scandal on campus, Ingrid quits her job in protest. Now, when she isn’t fending off the amorous advances of Miles (Joshua Quinn), a smitten student, or otherwise generally slacking off, she’s exploring a new career path by writing “feminist literotica” for a “research-based” website.
Forcibly enough, Ingrid talks the talk about scientific study, data-gathering techniques or being a “scholar of sexuality and gender roles in world culture,” even if her own lack of sexual history is plainly nothing to write home about, as it were. Soon, she resorts to simply adding her “trademark anthropological spin” to narratives that she appropriates from the willing Miles.
The capable Melich does what she can with the role, although Fazio doesn’t do the character a lot of favors, typically emphasizing Ingrid’s “hysterical tendencies” more intently than shading her with much depth or nuance. The show’s heightened madcap tone ultimately overwhelms and undercuts much of the personal impact of Ingrid’s (literally) climactic awakening.
Conversely, as Miles, Quinn is certainly nice-looking, but he downplays and softens most of the kid’s edge — hardly as “gung-ho” as he’s described to be, and just sort of cute and sweet instead. Rounding out the cast: Matthew Busch, as Ingrid’s sharp-tongued brother; and Eliana Marianes, who scores with a scene-stealing, fittingly “take-charge” turn as an insatiable young woman they meet at a bookstore.
Needless to say, given Fazio's farcical framework, there are any number of randy romantic trysts that ensue among the four of them. On the other hand, it probably should be noted that there are several flashes of equal-opportunity nudity, as well.
Noteworthy, too, is scenic designer Kristina White’s exceedingly stylish rendering of Ingrid’s comfortable apartment. Other members of Foulger’s all-female design team include Mary Parker (lights), Samantha P. McDaniel (costumes), Courtney Greever-Fries (sound) and Suzanne Cooper Morris (props).
But “The Flower Room” doesn’t quite succeed as the “eye-opening, revelatory” feminist statement it tries so hard to be. By the end of the unwieldy 90-minute comedy, like her heroine, Fazio has lost any real sense of control or purpose, only to basically find herself in the weeds.
THEATER REVIEW
“The Flower Room”
Through May 13. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. $21.60-$39.96. Actor's Express (at King Plow Arts Center), 887 W. Marietta St. NW, Atlanta. 404-607-7469, www.actors-express.com.
Bottom line: More hyperactive than insightful.
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