By BOB HOOVER
The patriarchy has taken punches to the midsection in two recent productions on our regional stages.
City Theatre last month presented Salina Fillinger‘s farce, POTUS Or Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying To Keep Him Alive, the title which sums up the plot as a bumbling, philandering U.S. president would amount to nothing without his cast of female backers.
In Crocodile Fever at barebones productions, Irish playwright Meghan Tyler’s two female characters instead do their best to kill their father. They got rid of their sainted “mummy” a few years earlier, an accident, it turns out, but sisters Alannah and Fianna Devlin have suffered untold misery since – and probably before.
The time is 1989 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when The Troubles ravaged the divided city, Protestants on one side backed by Great Britain and Irish Catholics on the other.
The family is divided as well. Fianna, played by a fierce Phoebe Lloyd, shows up at her sister’s home 11 years after their mother’s death, but Alannah slams the front door in her face.
In a shapeless robe with her hair pulled tightly in a bun, Sara Lindsey’s Alannah seems to embody the definition of hopelessness. Her one treat is her “sad crisps,” bags of potato chips she guards with defiance. As her crippled father’s caretaker, Alannah has no life outside her kitchen, which is neatly organized and sparkling clean, because she obsessively scrubs it for hours.
The “retired” Tony Ferrieri designed the plain kitchen but forgot one key detail – the tea kettle, which no Irish stove would be without.
Fianna enrages her sister when she breaks the kitchen window and sticks her muddy boots inside, dragging her bulging backpack behind her. This being an Irish play, Fianna tosses the f-word around like popcorn, pulls a pint of rum and a pistol out of her pack, and tries to make herself comfortable as her sister sweeps a broom around her. (No need to refer to Chekhov’s “gun.”)
The sisters’ anger is near the boiling point, almost reaching physical attacks. “I always wanted to fight a nun,” Fianna laughs at her sibling. Much of Crocodile Fever’s early going bogs down in the familiar “dysfunctional family” routine as old resentments surface and we slowly get hints of the truth behind the Devlins’ downfall.
Fianna is probably connected to the Irish Republican Army in some way, but she shares little of her activities with her sister. Guided by longtime dialect coach Don Wadsworth, Lloyd and Lindsey sound like characters in The Commitments, but with occasional undecipherable moments.
Patrick Jordan, barebones’ director, pushes the wordy dialogue ahead with urgency until something finally happens – Alannah’s transformation from a drab, obedient daughter to a dangerous drunk (she likes her gin and tonics made “a certain way.”)
The trigger is the Toto song, “Africa,” played by Fianna on a boombox. Slowly Alannah starts to sway to the music and sings, “I guess it rains on an apricot.”
She’s human, after all.
Amid the humor and singing, Fianna slips up to her father’s bedroom, and that gun goes off. She’s shot “Da” in his paralyzed leg. Strangely, neither sister seems to care, a clue to the rotten character of the old man, played by Anthony McKay, a veteran national actor and Carnegie Mellon theater professor. Both Lloyd and Lindsey are CMU alums.
Devlin finally emerges, sliding down the stairs, bleeding profusely, the beginning of gallons of blood that will follow. Crocodile Fever has turned from drama to a horror show with echoes of Carrie and other Stephen King works.
Now comes the tedious explanation of how a crocodile found itself in Belfast. The sisters know the myth of the Asmat people of New Guinea, who believed crocodiles embodied the spirits of evil people. Their defense was to kill the crocs, eat them, and use their skins for bags, etc.
Da is the crocodile of the story. “These aren’t ordinary times,” says Fianna, an obvious understatement as she watches her sister plunge a knife into the helpless father. He still has enough breath to name the sister guilty of starting the fire that killed their mother and sent the daughters to jail.
As the play’s 90 minutes tick off, we finally get the evil reptile in all its slimy scales in a fog bank, a large, unnamed actor in a costume sounding a lot like Da. The sisters, soaked in their father’s blood, must confront this, whatever it is, but at what cost?
There’s a brief appearance by a British soldier played by Max Pavel, but of little consequence except to retell the story of the nasty treatment of Catholics under the Union Jack.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Crocodile Fever by Meghan Tyler presented by barebones productions, 1211 Braddock Ave., Braddock. Now through Oct. 20
Tickets at www.barebonesproductions.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
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