- Oh my....... oh my..... okay, so this is like getting food poisoning, and the best thing to do is just vomit, and get it out of your body. This may sound like hyperbole, but I truly believe this may be THE WORST PLAY I HAVE EVER SEEN! If I wasn't there with other people, I would have walked out. In fact, maybe I should have anyway. These notes are going to be harsh, but I must reiterate that I am not exaggerating the devastatingly disastrous thing that was this play.
- I wish I could just forget it all, block it out, and never re-visit this traumatic experience, but I feel I must do what I can to alleviate the pain this play brings about. I also feel I have a duty to humanity because I have been informed the playwright, Rick Charles Mueller, believes he and this play have a future in this business we call show, and that the tragic performance I was forced to suffer through went well. Oblivious.
- Let's start with this idea: future. I'm flabbergasted that Mueller has a PAST in the theatre according to his bio. Supposedly, he has acting experience, but his auto-biographical performance was the first of MANY problems with the production. Mueller was consistently awkward and unnatural including line delivery (which he often flubbed) and his strange and uncomfortable-looking posing and gesturing. He had no sense of the energy of the room which died as soon as he started talking. He single-handedly killed the room. And he couldn't tell, because he was too busy rattling off inane historical facts that even the most boring history professor on the planet could deliver with more zest.
- Problem #2 out of infinity: Mueller's sandals. He slid around the stage in them causing an irritating shuffle sound likened to a blackboard scratch.
- Mueller's performance I would liken to a fisherman, his fellow cast members his doomed prey that he netted into his small one-man rowboat. As they flailed and flopped around just to stay alive, Mueller hammered them to death with a mallet.
- But moving on from his nauseating acting abilities (a master class of what NOT to do), he also wrote this piece of trash. From start to finish, it was clear the entire piece was set up to create the chain of events that end in Mueller getting to kiss a young guy. The kiss moment itself was climactic only in how sad and obvious its purpose in the play was: masturbation for Mueller. (I know this sounds extra harsh, but it was very obvious). The kiss was absurd, disgusting, and an embarrassing perpetuation of a homophobic stereotype.
- Let's talk about that stereotype. I learned that the original choice Mueller made for the "character" was to queen it up. Even with that idiotic idea gone, the relationship of Mueller and his boy-object was problematic to say the least. It is not just set up, but beaten to death, that Mueller's role is a surrogate father figure for the boy's missing deadbeat dad. Fine. Mentor/father figure. Line in text: "he who is like a father." Got it. Sexualizing this=creepy/predatory/homophobic. Mueller's character flirts with and pursues the boy relentlessly, and in odd ways seems to try to convert him to the gay side (the boy character is straight, but later, possibly bi-curious or who knows what, just as long as there's some rationalization for making out).
- More about objectification.... so already Mueller creepily interacts with the boy character, Evan. He informs Evan that he was hired because he was "gorgeous." Now that relationship is already pretty terrifying, BUT Mueller's objectification of women is even more frightening. Evan's mother is an invisible character, diagnosed with breast cancer during the events of the play. Mueller using this situation to get closer to Evan is very disturbing, but made moreso when talking to Evan about his mother's breasts. There was also a flubbed line, probably intended to be: "the lump is small," but came out, "the breast is small." It actually kind of added to the creep/gross/stop talking factor.
- More about depiction of women... so this play bounces around in time between the modern male characters and Queen Anne and her possibly lesbian lover, Sarah Jennings Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. The play might have been worth watching if it was just them. The two actors, Victoria Tucci as Anne and Emma Servant as the Duchess, both contributed a refreshing energy to the stage and listened to each other and paid attention to the audience (kind of the basics, but Tony-worthy next to Mueller). However, these characters get buried because of the frame of the play. Okay, so the play is about Mueller writing with his hunky boytoy/assistant, Evan, about Queen Anne. So, the depictions of Anne and Sarah are projections THROUGH Mueller. They are objects of his bizarre history fetish (hey, I'm a historian myself, but this was more creeptown fetish than research area) that verges on diva worship. The women didn't have agency of their own, but were reduced to being figments of a male mind. There was further content in the play about Mueller aiding the success of Evan's career, so the whole thing just felt like a boy's club. White guys giving opportunities to more white guys, to be paid back in sexual favors.
- Mueller even made the Evan character an objectifier, while being himself objectified. He talked about previous girlfriends in the worst cliche of a fratboy, with lines like: "I don't think I could marry her, but she *is* hot" because, obviously, women are only there to be looked at and valued by sex appeal. Barf.
- Okay, I have to wrap this up, because it's really just all so terrible. I'm going to move away from attacking Mueller now, and talk briefly about the production itself.
- Direction: weird. Bizarre-o abstract-y movements that were inconsistent and just plain strange. Also Mueller didn't have the technique to sell it. Things like slow motion moving and freezing. Yes....they really did that. My fave moment of this kind of direction was Anne's backwards somersault on the floor post-miscarriage. Pretty amazing, and by amazing I mean bad, but props to Tucci for doing the move in that gigantic circus tent, I mean dress.
- Which brings me to costume design. The men were a giant fail, so I just won't even go there. (remember the sandals?) So the dresses.... not completely awful, but they were ill-fitting. The Duchess's gown kept slipping off her shoulders, revealing Servant's awesome, but anachronistic shoulder tat. If the play was better, that kind of anachronism could have been a nice intentional nod to playing with time periods, but... in this case, no. The dress just didn't fit. There were also exposed and gleaming safety pins holding up the skirt.
- As for anachronisms, Anne and Sarah were given very modern movement directions, that, again, MAY have worked if they went gung ho all the way through with modernizing their physicality, but failed because... well they didn't, and the play was terrible.
- Okay, I'm going to round up this unintentionally homophobic and sexist play by pointing out a line that sums it all up. I love when a play writes its own epitaph: "Dear God, this confusion is not necessary."
- Prescription: Needs an Rx refill. Zero T shots.
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Cole
Trans man, Playwright, Dramaturg, and Theatre & Dance Historian Archives
August 2014
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