Theater review
“The Summer of Daisy Fay”
Grade: C-
8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Through Nov. 25. $20. Marietta Theatre, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 470-255-0074, mariettatheatre.org
Bottom line: Southern silliness with a dash of heartbreak.
With her horribly chipped front tooth and her embarrassingly nerdy glasses, Daisy Fay Harper is having a miserable summer.
On her way to the Miss Mississippi beauty contest, she’s like a Honey Boo Boo of the ’50s, a picaresque heroine here to regale us with tales of drunken crop-duster pilots; runaway mules; her best friend forever, Pickle Watkins; her archnemesis, Kay Bob Benson; and her stage-and-pageant misadventures under the auspices of a gay hat designer named Mr. Cecil.
Based on Fannie Flagg’s novel “Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man” and adapted and directed by “Greater Tuna” co-author Ed Howard, “The Summer of Daisy Fay” is the inaugural production of Marietta Theatre. The theater has sprung up in the Cobb County playhouse vacated by the financially embattled Theatre in the Square earlier this year.
It’s reassuring to see this beloved landmark get a second chance. With Howard as artistic director and a minimal aesthetic, Marietta Theatre shows us what it’s got with “Daisy Fay.” Like the “Tuna” franchise, it’s a crowd-pleasing low comedy laced with cheap laughs. After wallowing in Southern Gothic eccentricities, it occasionally reveals this young woman’s discovery of the cruelties of life.
“Daisy Fay” is no literary masterpiece, but it is an archetypal tale of initiation in the tradition of “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Color Purple” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”
“I hate men!” Daisy (played by the irrepressible comedic wunderkind Veronika Duerr) tells us at the top of the one-woman show, set in her Hattiesburg bedroom in the summer of 1958. But as the play unfolds and this ugly duckling is transformed into a gossamer swan, we see the demons lurking in the corners of her raucous anecdotes.
Nailing these gentle shifts of tone, these glimmers of heartbreak and hypocrisy, can be tricky, though. While Flagg wrote in a diaristic format, Howard’s conceit is to have Daisy narrate in a breathless spew of anecdotes, a self-imposed challenge that weighs us down in a turgid past-tense world. It’s a lot more fun, it seems, to give us Southern weirdness than to flesh out the details of Daisy’s jilting or the loss of her mother. The second act, a behind-the-scenes account of the pageant, is interminable.
Daisy’s bedroom is a sparse affair of antique-white “French provincial” furniture, appropriate to the period, and a bulletin board pinned with fliers from her thespian pursuits. No design credits are given.
And in case you are wondering, the ghosts of Theatre in the Square are very much in the wings. The old signage remains, and we are greeted by the familiar face of longtime house manager Gene Bradley. It might be easy to dismiss this endeavor as a vanity project — up next, Howard and company’s “Tuna Christmas” — but audiences are having a great time, and I’m thrilled to see a bit of bustle and excitement in this vaunted playhouse.
Some folks want a gourmet meal when they see a play. Others are happy with “Tuna” casserole. There’s plenty of room at the table for everyone.
