Comic Potential Review

http://www.willamettelive.com/story/Pentacle39s_new_play_doesn39t_live_up_it_it39s_quotPotentialquot121.html

Here is a link to my review of Comic Potential at the Pentacle Theater in Salem, Oregon, as it appears on the Willamette Live website.

Here is the text of the review:

Pentacle's new play doesn't live up to its "Potential"
By Maren Bradley Anderson
from WillametteLive, Section Stage
Posted on Fri Jul 17, 2009 at 03:37:22 PM PDT

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The shows I have seen at Pentacle Theater in Salem aren’t ashamed of their local-theater roots—the cheap sets, the thin costumes—because they know that the strength of the performances on stage will overshadow these things. There are limits to what good acting can gloss over, however. The current play doesn’t live up to my expectations of a Pentacle production.

Comic Potential, playing at Pentacle Theater through August 1, is a story set in the future on the set of a troubled daytime drama which is performed by android actors or “actoids.” One of the actoids, Jacie (played by Cheryl Witters), gains a form of consciousness and has a quasi-affair with a young (human) writer, Adam Trainsmith (played by Gary Strong), who is writing a TV comedy for her.

Witters and Strong, the leads of the show, are surprisingly good, and I mean that in that they surprised me. Neither of their characters is the focus of the show when they are introduced. Witter’s character, Jacie, laughs at inappropriate times during filming, and everyone assumes she is broken. I didn’t pick her out as a lead until she started talking late in first scene. Strong’s character doesn’t start to shine until he begins explaining physical comedy to Jacie in the same scene. These two actors successfully take the characters from flat stereotypes to “people” we can root for.

The script is fun and brings up all sorts of typical, android-linked discussions like “What makes us human?” and “Can a machine fall in love?” There were reflections of Pygmalion in the script as Adam tries to make Jacie more human, and so I find it more than a little ironic that Pentacle’s next play is My Fair Lady.

Another enjoyable part of the show was that the cast and crew have fun with costumes and music that reflects a love of movie and television icons, especially Star Trek, Laverne and Shirley, and Marilyn Monroe.

There were a few hitches. Annoyingly, there was a plot hole surrounding how Chance, a 20th century director (entertainingly played by Jon D. Miho), arrived in “the future” to direct daytime TV.

The major flaw with this production was with the set, which had two problems. First, the television studio on the main stage was clearly constructed of cardboard and duct tape. Perhaps the design team thought that they were making the consoles look fifty years old, as a character complained they were. From my seat, however, it was hard to suspend disbelief with the grain of the cardboard showing through the gray paint.

The second flaw lies in second stage built above and behind the main stage. This was used to great effect in Seussical the Musical a few months ago. In Comic Potential, doors hide the upper stage, which is used for a number of quick scene changes in Act 2. However, the process of changing the scenes is so noisy that it detracts from the action on the main stage. The crew should take its shoes off at least.

Finally, this is not a show I would take the kids to. There is lots of highly enjoyable sexual innuendo and some wonderfully colorful language that I wouldn’t want to explain to anyone under 17. Enjoy it as if it were at least a PG-13 rated movie.

Overall, this is an enjoyable show with good acting and directing. It is silly and fun and off-color in all the right ways and pokes fun at the world of acting in general. If the inexpensive sets bother you like they bother me, donate some money to the theater so they can use plywood next time. I did.