PENGUINS, PUPPIES AND PORN
nytheatre.com review by Dan Asher
August 15, 2003
Penguins Puppies and Porn lists
itself as a night of two one act plays. It is actually three separate
pieces, each having a loose relation to one of the objects in the
evening’s title.The first, called Law of Life, takes place in a Manhattan taxidermist’s studio, where proprietors George and Martha debate such high concepts as the natural world’s role in mankind’s day-to-day operations, and the element of cruelty in the process of natural selection.
I have never seen a taxidermist’s studio, but at lights up I was sure that set designer C.D. Christian had done his homework. Surrounded by stuffed and mounted animals, George (Josh Peters) asks Martha (Chantel Cherisse Lucier) "What happens to the carcasses of penguins?" A legitimate enough question for you and I to ponder, but it seemed strange that someone in the profession of carcass restoration wouldn’t know. The conversation winds its way to Mother Nature’s cruel-to-be-kind behaviors such as, how and why does a beautiful mother hawk decide which of her children to feed, and which to eat herself in service of Nature’s bigger purpose? Some interesting writing and brain-teasing material from author Rhea MacCallum, but it doesn’t carry a thirty-minute piece without more interesting characters.
The evening continues with its Puppies portion, a series of short vignettes, called "12 Billion," canines being the common thread. It opens in a doctor’s office, where an expectant couple has come to see a sonogram, and have a fight over whether or not they will keep the child. The argument is a gem. Playwright Nicol Alexander pens a hilarious domestic dispute, and actors Beth Hope and Craig Butta do a terrific job fighting as only a couple whose fetus has the head of a dog can fight. (It turns out she is a porn star, he is her pimp/manager, and she did some scenes with a German Shepard.) The next scenes follow a serial New York dog killer from his rampage to his arrest and interrogation. His justification for all the doggie homicide? This country’s willingness to spend $12 billion on food and medical expenses for dogs, while American children starve. The dialogue, acting, and directing in this section is banal, and any momentum it does gain is interrupted by unnecessary, unexplainable blackouts.
In the finale, Porn, we are in God’s waiting room where sick Long Legged Lizzie has come to beg God to return to earth and help us all. Actress Chantel Cherisse Lucier’s character work is excellent. At one point, I felt claustrophobic and panicked at her embodiment of the human race’s final stages of its debilitating, terminal disease.
