By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
Now’s your chance to enjoy again all those pop culture irritations of the 1980s. You know, back when you could be on a date in a nice restaurant and a denim-wearing female stranger would take you to task for treating your date with special respect instead of giving her equal rudeness as if she was just another one of the guys.
Down at Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S. Sixth Ave., Lisa Mae Roether and Martie van der Voort are reliving those times and having the time of their lives playing 30 different characters doing 13 skits originally performed by actress/comics Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney in a collection titled “Parallel Lives.”
It’s not a night of prickly feminism, exactly, but kind of it because most of the humor – which is funny, no doubt about it – is based on the conviction that white men have always enjoyed making life difficult for women, homosexuals and people of all colors.
And also implied, but not to be mean about it, is that white women are riding to the rescue with determined spirits to make things right for everybody else.
Pretty much like how they would sort out all the kids in a playground squabble and make everyone play nice.
Directing the Beowulf Alley production with a casual hand is Whitney Morton. She has the actors jumping around energetically, pumping up the material with their enthusiasm.
Roether and van der Voort play both genders of various ages, plus a couple of winged characters known as Supreme Beings. Generally, Roether gets the quirky roles and van der Voort handles the…umm…more ballsy ones.
While the show runs some 2 ½ hours with intermission, everything moves quickly. All the pieces are tightly written and easy to follow, the set-ups clear and clever.
For example, in the opening scene those two Supreme Beings are discussing what qualities they should give the human beings that will inhabit the new planet Earth. These Supremes spend a lot of time deciding which colors Earth people should be, then feel sorry for the white people because they don’t have any color to their skin at all.
Several scenes later we get to imagine how differently menstruation would be treated in society if it was men who had their monthly period instead of women.
Other conflicting values from the culture clashes of that time include performance artists (remember them?), muscle-flexing womyn, New Age spiritualists, large paintings depicting genitals, women’s studies on campus and Walt Disney movies promoting princes who always save the lovely princess (and wondering why must the princess always be so lovely).
“Parallel Lives” continues through Aug. 25 at Beowulf Alley Theatre, 11 S. Sixth Ave., with performances at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $20, $18 for seniors, teachers, and military. Student tickets are $10 with current I.D.
For details and reservations, contact Michael Fenlason at 520.882.0555 or visit www.beowulfalley.org.
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