Fact is, ‘Life’ is hilarious, ‘Insecurity’ gets laughs from terror and ‘Bloodletters’ goes for the throat

Girl on girl action
On the official Farrelly Brothers Raunchiness Scale of 1 to 10, “Sesame Street” clocks in at 1, “American Pie” hovers around 7, Sarah Silverman is 9.5 and holding. But “The Facts of Life: The Lost Episode”? It registered about 37 before the needle popped off and hit a drag queen in the boob. During a funeral. Of the pope.

Say it with me: Clas-s-s-sssssy.

Uptown Players has never allowed good taste to interfere with good entertainment, operating on the principal that in the dark, no one can see how red-faced you get laughing at fart jokes and simulated sex between men in dresses. Civility should not be confused with walking away happy the theater.

If there was anyone at the Rose Room on opening night of the TV spoof who didn’t leave with a goofy grin plastered across his mug, if was only due to facial-muscle exhaustion occasioned during the previous 90 minutes.

You probably don’t have to be an ageing Gen-Xer to appreciate “FOL: The Lost Episode,” but it doesn’t hurt. In the opening scene, blue-blooded student Blair Warner (like all the parts, played by a man — here, Chad Peterson) is in her dorm room at the Eastland School for Girls in upstate New York, dancing a perfect reproduction of Jennifer Beals’ “Maniac” number from “Flashdance” while a poster of Scott Baio looks on. If any of those pop culture references fail to set off bells, you might miss some of the inside jokes, but it doesn’t take a couch potato to chuckle at the energy and cleverness of the scene. Maybe that’s why the playwright, Jamie Morris, wrote all the parts to be performed in drag: A man in a dress is its own punchline, even if you don’t know who he’s supposed to be.

And whom each actor portrays, ultimately, is irrelevant. Sure, as chubby Natalie, Chris Robinson mashes up his nose and squints his eyes in the same self-deprecating fashion as Mindy Cohn causes eerie laughter on its own, but when Blair inspects her private parts with a hand mirror — well, let’s just say you didn’t need to be a fan of the ‘80s sitcom to find it funny and revolting.

“The Lost Episode” isn’t really; it’s entirely the product of Morris’ twisted mind, adding tons of inappropriate humor you would be challenged to find on premium cable nowadays, not to say on NBC of yesteryear. There are no sacred cows here — with the possible exception of Natalie. Dildos, prostitution, lesbian sex, cerebral palsy and a dubious metaphor about mayonnaise are only some of the shocking, politically-incorrect plot developments that mark this as an “adults-only” show.

Comic potential easily trumps logic — the play is set in the 1980s, but make references to Starbucks and current events that are blatantly out of place, and the second act somewhat unexpectedly becomes a musical — but who cares? When the actors occasionally break each other up, you realize the only things missing are Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence and a Bob Mackie dress to make the Carol Burnett format complete.

The entire cast has a blast. Peterson turns dramatic hair-tossing into a contact sport — I’d be surprised if his neck vertebrae don’t look like gelatin by the end of the run from its continual whiplash motion. As Jo, Blair’s Joan Jett-like nemesis, Kevin Moore makes for a grim girl, all mullet and graceless, cartoonlike tomboyishness … which is exactly as he should be. Cameron Leighton Kirkpatrick makes Tootie a dervish on roller skates, twirling into a frenzy.

The comedic fulcrum, though, is Paul J. Williams as Mrs. Garrett. Glancing at his charges disparagingly over half-glasses, his Parkinson’s-like vocal tremor stretch out one-syllable words into choruses of clucking disapproval, Williams doesn’t even need to say funny things — he just says things funny.

Director Andi Allen and choreographer Linda Leonard have created a new kind of play for Uptown and the Rose Room: The cabaret comedy, an hysterically vulgar bit of meta-drag. Keep ‘em coming, guys.


It’s just my imagination
Nothing really bad happens on stage in “The Lost Episode” — it’s mostly just talk. But Tom Sime’s horror-comedy “Bloodletters” is not only adult-oriented because of its language, but its content, which includes a few violent attacks in between the humor.

“Bloodletters” tells two parallel stories performed by the same actors. In one, a writer of racy novels (Cindee Mayfield) deals with her husband (Kevin Grammer), daughter (Elizabeth Van Winkle) and granddaughter (Rebekah Kennedy) while writing a vampire story; in the other, the vampire story comes to life, with all the characters based on her family. This is especially upsetting to her husband, who in the book is portrayed as the bitchy gay assistant to a malevolent vampire (David Lugo).

This is a world premiere of the full production, although I attended a staged reading of the piece last year that was nearly identical. Director Robin Armstrong was tasked with taking an unusually cinematic play and making it work in the small Teatro Dallas space; she has succeeded in fluidly transitioning between the scenes of reality and fantasy. There are creepy, sexualized scenes played with great style.

Indeed, the production itself has much to recommend it, from Grammer’s lugubrious, droll Renfield impersonation to Lugo’s sexy, suave vampire to an unexpected finale. But Sime, here and in his play “All of the Above,” seems preoccupied with imagery and plot points that don’t translate well on stage. In “All of the Above,” it was gimmickry about a hand transplant (?) and creating a unique language with a blind/deaf woman; here, it’s a key issue revolved around a toy preserved in bronze. You sense there’s a metaphorical reason behind his choices, but if there is, it’s difficult to parse. Are we meant to laugh or empathize? And does that ambiguity add or detract from the experience?

The horror comedy is a legitimate, distinct genre, and some of “Bloodletters” calls to mind “The Rocky Horror Show.” The concept is solid, and the production promising, but it doesn’t all come together — it’s neither consistently comic or sustainedly scary, but, like its central character, in a nether world: Neither alive nor deceased but undead, existing in shadows, forever waiting to pounce.


Future shock
It’s been nearly seven years since the attacks of 9/11, and we live in a different world than we used to. We’re actually fearful of terrorism on our home turf, and we’ve tacitly agreed to a number of infringements on the rights we once enjoyed. Some (removing your shoes at airports, background checks for pilot lessons) are tolerable or at least manageable; others (domestic spying, suspension of constitutional rights for foreign nationals) remain controversial, if they don’t actually shock the conscience. But have we reached the limits to what we will willing endure?

Not if you ask Bretton B. Holmes. Holmes, himself a war veteran, has written a smart play in “Homeland Insecurity, Or How I Learned to Love the Patriot Act,” now onstage at the Stone Cottage Theatre. Smart, if not wholly successful: It works almost better as a live-action op-ed piece in satiric form than as a play itself, although it’s worth recommending for its point of view alone.

It’s about 10 years in the future, and George Shrub (Joe Porter), a well-heeled Highland Park architect, has become a patriotic lemming — so much so, he’s happy to welcome a Marine, Jenkins (Chad Holbrook), to live in his house as long as the government deems it necessary. After all, who wouldn’t quarter members of the military? A terrorist, perhaps? Or one of their spineless liberal sympathizers?

George’s wife, Sylla (Sherri Small Truitt), is less convinced. She’s the one at home all day, dealing with this strutting jackboot with hair, who has no qualms in placing listening devices in her marriage bed or demanding he be fed Froot Loops like Henry XIII at court.

The production is better at theorizing politically than socially. Many of the cultural touchstones, from Dr. Phil to Martha Stewart to the costumes, seem destined to be dated sooner than later. Pacing needs to be tighter — scene need to end sharply, not drift off. Still, Holmes’ dialogue is impressive in how effortlessly it recreates the banal chatter of married couples (which Truitt and Porter deliver effectively).

Playwright George S. Kaufman famously sniffed that satire is what closes on Saturday night, and “Homeland Insecurity” most definitely falls into that category, but with the honor owing a work that dares speak truth to power. Holmes’ comparison of Americans blinded by jingoism to brainless cattle is witheringly effective, and his insights into the slippery slope of lowered expectations are convincing and not all that outrageous. That might be scarier than terrorism itself.