Love Song
Love Song
By John Kolvenbach
Directed by Michael Marinaccio
Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando, FL</strong>
Most men have fantasy girl friends, but few are as needy as Beane’s (Josh Geoghagen). His sister Joan (Lauren Maleski) thinks imaginary friends are bad idea in your 30s, and he needs “professional help.” Now in my experience “professional help” means either endless whiny meetings with overtly sensitive and caring counselors, or Thorazine. I recommend he check if his insurance covers electroshock. Beane really is in a bad way, he lives in a claustrophobic New York apartment with a single flickering light bulb and walls that creep in on him, and homeless people have larger wardrobes than he. While Joan worries, she at least has the comfort of a loving yet argumentative hubby, Harry (Christian Kelty). Harry thinks she should lighten up on her interns at work, and in a spasm of total caring, he suggests they both blow off work and spend the day making out, drinking imagined bourbon, and shooting imagined junk. While this is saner than Beane’s hallucination isn’t clear. This whole family reeks of creativity, and even Beane’s imaginary girlfriend Molly (Alexis Jackson) joins the act with an imagined gift to Beane – permission to leave his mental prison and live in the real world for a while.
I’d rank this as a quirky love story with two very interesting relation. Joan and Harry bicker so they can enjoy the make up sex, while Beane and Molly cling to each other to survive the overbearing apocalyptic version of NYC they call home. Kelty and Maleski both play the cute and flirty, but Geoghagen and Jackson enter into a dreamily erotic world that suffers the indignity of reality knocking on the door just when things get good. One relation is fully realized, the other buzzes with potential, and both prove eroticism is all in your head.
Director Marinaccio crams a whole semesters worth of furniture moving onto a microscopic and cleverly designed set. Walls fold in and out, changing not only the location but the relation between location and action. Michael Plummer plays a waiter, but I suspect his real value to the show is keeping the right walls facing the right way during the scene changes and lifting the heavy end of the couch. Alan Bruun popped in for a post show talk back, and complained few modern writers are willing to right about love for loves sake, preferring the dysfunctional or the political. He’s got a valid point, yet “Love Song” proves you take the oldest story in the book and spin a new angle without getting maudlin.
For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com
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