During her curtain speech at the opening-night performance of “Spoon Lake Blues,” Alliance artistic director Susan Booth extolled the virtues of an earlier work by newcomer Josh Tobiessen, a political comedy called “Election Day” that was a runner-up in the theater’s 2007 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. Why, then, Atlanta audiences are getting instead a world-premiere production of Tobiessen’s utterly lowbrow “Blues” is a puzzlement.
Set in a backwoods cabin (suitable for a gross running gag about faulty bathroom plumbing), the play's objectionable characters include a pair of dimwitted deadbeat brothers and (very) petty thieves, and their accomplice in crime, a rowdy and amorous lady cop – and the Harvard sociology student they eventually meet isn't drawn much more smartly or believably. Between the four of them, there's something to offend everyone.
Denis (Luke Robertson) is a beer-guzzling ex-con, a self-professed “stupid redneck” and unapologetic racist. “That’s America for you,” he snarls at one point. “Colored people have stuff worth stealing now.”
Funnily enough – but not really – his brother Brady (Jimi Kocina) wants to be black, or rather his interpretation of a certain stereotype. He's got the (stolen) bling; he knows the hip-hop slang; and he's forever posturing, with one hand affixed to his crotch or the other clinching the side of his pants, lest they slide all the way down his rear.
With bill collectors threatening to seize their “home,” they take to burglarizing affluent black families with vacation cottages at nearby Spoon Lake. When that perky sheriff, Abigail (Veronika Duerr), isn’t helping them set up scores or traffic their loot, she’s in bed with Denis or offering other pointers: “The accepted terminology is ‘person of color,’” she tells him.
Enter, most implausibly, an Ivy League coed named Caitlin (Lakisha Michelle May). That she’s rich and black means to bring some edge to the comedy regarding issues of class and race, but Tobiessen plays it safer by making her just as transparent and unappealing as anybody else. Inexplicably, she lures them into stealing her father’s prized collection of blues records.
“Romantic emotions are professionally ill-advised,” someone notes, although Tobiessen resorts to them anyway. Abigail has designs on Denis and Brady is smitten with Caitlin, so, naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Denis and Caitlin are sneaking kisses. Equally preposterous are developments involving certain skeletons in the closet, a literal grave robbing, and the ultimate assertion that Denis is “a good catch who’d do anything for his family.”
Directed by Davis McCallum, “Spoon Lake Blues” is dumbfounding all the way around.
Theater review
“Spoon Lake Blues”
Grade: D
Through April 24. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. $25-$30. Alliance Theatre Hertz Stage, 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-733-5000. alliancetheatre.org.
Bottom Line: Simply ludicrous.
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