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Playwright Maria Irene Fornes is arguably one of the most important U.S. dramatists of the past thirty years, but Cleveland audiences wouldn't know it from area theater seasons. There hasn't been a Fornes work mounted here except at area colleges since Dobama's production of "Promenade" in the late 1960's.
Now that the new Piece of People Theater Company is presenting Fornes' "Mud" at the Brick Alley Theatre, we can partly see why. Fornes' uncompromising material -- populated with unsavory characters in extreme situations -- needs strong acting and directing to make it palatable to an audience. Unfortunately, that's just what the PoP Theater Company is currently unable to provide. Although programming the work was a bold move, the production itself is shaky and timid, showing young artists considerably out of their depth.
"Mud", written in 1983, is emblematic of the period's gritty off-off-Broadway movement (Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love" appeared the same year). In it, we meet a bizarre menage a trois mired in rural squalor and domestic/erotic conflict. Mae, an illiterate housewife who irons incessantly, is a caretaker of sorts to her impotent housemate Lloyd -- a child-man so helpless and filthy that his biggest daily accomplishment is ejaculating on her clean kitchen wall. Mae undertakes a self-improvement programwhich includes going to night school to learn to read and do sums, pressing Lloyd to see a doctor, and beginning a live-in affair with Henry, who displaces Lloyd in her bed if not totally in her affections. ("You can sleep on the floor on these spread-out newspapers", she tells Lloyd matter-of-factly.) It's hardly a surprise when things end badly.
If some of this sounds incredibly over-the-top, even bleakly comic, it is: that's part of the problem with director Jon Herbert's low-energy production. Herbert has directed "Mud" as though it is made-for-TV realism, instead of with the wild physical abandon and extremes the play needs. Except for a few moments -- which does include the play's final stark image -- the actors seem mostly at sea, and the sense of sexual tension and danger is virtually nonexistent.
Andrew Narten as Lloyd fares best, because he's able to physicalize; he manages to looks so wounded and lost, he gains your sympathy in spite of the character's crudeness. Gretchen Thomas plays Mae with a kind of frustrated petulance that stays at one level; she's like a college student who is tired of cleaning up after her piggy male roommates. Besides being unsympathetic and not very believable, she's often hard to hear. And with his British accent and line-fumbling, Simon Lovell is so miscast and inept as Henry, the energy is sucked out of nearly every scene he's in.
The production choices also conspire to lower the stakes instead of raising them: even the costumes of torn jeans and designer Buck Weed's kitchen set with orange crate furniture give us the impression of an off-campus apartment instead of Fornes' expressionist trailer-trash hell.
Despite all of this, Fornes' play still has strangely compelling qualities -- but it's like watching it through a muddy window.