San Diego Arts"The Listener" by Moxie Theatre at the Lyceum Space
The clash in the trash Ricocheting breathlessly through the juicy halls of pop culture is endless fun because the landscape is always in flux. The rave of the today is the dud of tomorrow and it takes effort to keep up. That’s why attempts to inhabit a fictional future never quite work at any serious level: All of us tend to inflate the influence of our native moment. So a story set – say – a century from now may find our descendents still obsessing on gas prices or stem cells or reality TV, ignoring the even bigger stories of the decades between now and then. But why bother to make up years of back-story? Just relax and have fun. Thus fantasy and science fiction continue to be mildly disreputable escapism. And that’s plenty for Moxie Theatre, which continues its string of sassy, stylish shows with Liz Duffy Adams’ new play “The Listener,” now in a too-brief run at the Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza Shopping Center. Before the script wilts in the home stretch, director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg and a solid, haunting cast of five make the story gallant, outrageous, intriguing and sad. Adams offers us Junk City, an environment of material chaos inhabited by scavengers who live within a crude but effective set of survivor rules. There are Finders, who do the actual gathering; Namers, who decide what’s worth keeping; and Jimmys, who make things work. Details are missing – another big problem in writing about the future is how much scene to bother setting – but these people seem content with a practical caste system and a body of law tied together by a creation myth of obvious origins. “Sam, our Uncle” the ultimate deity with a stable of supporting gods such as the all-wise Ophra, the sensual Mydonna and Elvis, who gave his life but keeps getting resurrected. There was an Eve who ate of the forbidden fruit and, with her followers, was cast out of the Mall by Sam ... etc. Another version of the story comes from John, an explorer sent from “Nearth,” which turns out to be the moon, renamed and extensively remodeled several generations previously when a majority of humanity decided that the best way to “maintain lifestyle” would be to junk a sadly-mistreated Earth and start over. John turns out to be part of a tree-hugger minority that feels guilty over having left remnants of the race behind. But his investigation is rigged to fail so that the Nearth party in control can justify a surgical strike that eliminates even a possible enemy in the rear as the race contemplates its next planetary jump. And certainly passive John looks to be ground up by the Junk City system, which absorbs both him and his spacecraft with solid efficiency. The breakthrough comes from the Listener, a hereditary priestess of tech who maintains the colony’s last working radio system and, poignantly, sends endless unanswered queries to the other surviving earthlings that are believed to be out there somewhere. Listener – her name and title are one – may be the only citizen of Junk City equipped to hear and understand the story that the captive John insists upon stating. Namer is threatened by this assault on orthodoxy; the finders who capture John find his babble tedious at best, perhaps seditious. The journey which the playwright imagines is best when it relies on the clash of systems. Halfway through the play, the ultimate resolution of this encounter has become a matter of great interest. Unfortunately, love, sex, high-tech and melodrama are allowed to seep in through the cracks and the ending tapers away amidst unresolved complications. All the several loose ends left flapping suggests that the author decided to go with guilty pleasures of the obvious denouement. What a cast and what a job of steering them. But first, a word about the decor. Amy Chini’s set is overwhelming junk, as would be expected, but junk of a nicely ambiguous nature. And the costumes, by Jennifer Eve Thorn and Sheri Kraus, make good sense in a world of random chaos. Eric Lotze’s dramatic lighting and Tom Jones’ modest sound track are in the same spirit. Tim Parker and Rachael Van Wormer chatter away at Adams’ careening syntax to exhilarating effect as they cavort through the junk mounts like apes in their native boughs. And the brutalized patois doesn’t keep them from moments of real tenderness. Walter Murray plays Namer with an Old Testament conviction and an imperious authority which papers over some of the holes in the story right up until the script begins to shift under him. Steven Lone followers a very plausible path from desperate frustration to understanding acceptance without exaggerating the character’s quirks and Jo Anne Glover finds a truly fascinating combination of dreamer, nun and investigator as Listener, a character that probably wouldn’t work in just any hands. And, finally, this strutting fantasy bears the fingerprints of Sonnenberg, a director who can make everybody –- audiences and colleagues alike – believe.
 Welton Jones About the author: Welton Jones has been reviewing shows for more than 50 years, 35 of those years at the San Diego Union-Tribune and, now, nearly 10 for SanDiego.com, where he wrote the first reviews to appear on the site. More by this author Subscribe to Arts:
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Seems like things are changing with Moxie -- one founding member missing, two new members born...what does the future have in store for us...will we all wind up in Junk City....will we sing, "Swing low, Sweet Harriet" and hunting for squish....will be become Stars or vanish into the netherworld of nothingness...will the heat melt us or will our levees break and the floods come rushing in...
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June 22, 2008
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