Frankie Moran

San Diego Arts

"Funny Bones" -- A Challenge Theatre production at 6th @ Penn

No bones in sight, but worth a try
By Frankie Moran
Posted on May 06 2008
Last updated May 06 2008

The challenge: to write a short comedy about death. Now playing at 6th at Penn as the final offering under that name, "Funny Bones," a collection of four new one-act plays by San Diego playwrights, is the wildly varied result. Not always wildly funny, mind you, but definitely varied in their approaches to finding humor in death.

Probably the only one of the four pieces to match the tone of the juggling clown-faced skeleton on the program cover is the first in the lineup, Dallas McLaughlin's "Death: Live in Concert." The star of this mini-concert is billed in the program only as the Grim Reaper (though Death looks rather suspiciously like celebrated local actor Jeremiah Lorenz -- rarely before has Death desired such anonymity...). Glammed out in glittery makeup and dressed in black combat boots and cape, under which are steadily revealed several sequinned get-ups that might make even Hedwig jealous, Lorenz plays Death as a chatty, catty gay Grim Reaper who does a mean Malynn-in-the-cemetery Sally Field impersonation. Accompanying him on a Roland keyboard is a young man in blond wig and Vegas lounge lizard attire billed as Johnny Avalon, who plays straight man to Death's banter. The songs are an odd mix, everything from a peppy opening number ("I'm a Nice Guy, That's Me") to covers of "What the World Needs Now" and the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love," and Lorenz possesses a strong pop voice in need of better material. A cameo appearance by one "Dean O'Dean" is a bit of non sequitur, and doesn't deliver the rendition of little orphan Annie's "Tomorrow" as promised. Though the one-liners are at times truly groan-worthy (example: "I come from Down Under...way down under"), McLaughlin and Lorenz have emerged from the challenge with an act that could very well find a better home at a comedy club or gay venue. On Halloween, perhaps. In fact, the evening might seem a whole lot funnier after one or two of this Grim Reaper's "deathtinis" -- a mixture of "vodka, Everclear, and a generous amount of Clorox" (oh, okay -- I suppose a regular gay appletini would do quite nicely).

The next offering, Tim West's "The Skull and Bones Tontine" is a quiet, somber little play dealing with a macabre wager placed by initiates to Yale's secretive Skull and Bones society. Opening with a ragtime melody that that takes us back to a year sometime during the Wilson presidency, West's play casts West himself as an old professor reminiscing about a day long ago when he and two friends took part in a secret pact, the outcome of which only he has lived to see. The three youths, played by Zach Guzik, Steve Hohman, and Justin Stepp, don't really seem anything like privileged undergrad Yalies any more than Chelsea Whitmore's static staging uses the space, but "The Skull and Bones Tontine" would make a nice entry in some other collection of short plays. There's not much humor, though, so it seems out of place in this one.

The first few minutes of David Wiener's "Feeding Time in the Human House" might make even a more adventurous theatregoer head for the nearest exit. Directed by Jessica Seaman, Wiener's witty two-hander presents us with a pair of actors -- one man, one woman -- clad head to toe in black, faces painted brown, cavorting about the stage like a pair of monkeys. Oh wait. They are a pair of monkeys. Baboons, actually. They pick each other's lice, throw poop, and generally do what monkeys in captivity do. Which, in Wiener's vivid imagination, includes having the time to muse about the meanings of life -- and death -- itself, when one monkey notices the female zoogoer in Roberto Cavalli hasn't been coming in with her "mate," who they speculate must have died. Michelle de Francesco plays the female half of the pair, who at 15 years old is facing a midlife crisis because her rear end doesn't swell up the way it used to. If at times the blue-eyeshadowed Ivan Harrison moves about the stage more like an animal of the feline variety than the simian, he and de Francesco are irresistible as the giddy, feces-flinging pair.

Last is Michael Thomas Tower's "One Down," an engaging Southern tale of decidedly un-"Ya Ya" sisterhood directed by Gilbert Songalia. Set in the podunky hamlet of the ironically named Twigg's Bend (it "ain't even on a damn river," one character notes), "One Down" perhaps has a slight advantage over the other three plays: playwright Tower is also, as director of the Challenge Theatre program at 6th at Penn, presumably the one who administered this "challenge" to write a comedy about death. At any rate, Tower has written a Southern-fried script that is gently poetic, with rural characters spouting off words like "respite" and "ribald." The cast of three features the superb Kelly Lapczynski, who has fun with Tower's droll dialogue ("friends call me Lucy, my sister calls me Lucifer") as the Southern Comfort-swilling Lucy, along with Leslie Gold as Lucy's hen-pecking sister, and Jude Evans as a drifter returned home to "make good."

It is more than somewhat apropos that this evening of works dealing with "the end" is the final opening of 6th at Penn Theatre before it transitions to its new name as Compass Theatre in a few weeks. "Funny Bones" may not be the best collection of short plays ever assembled, but as one-acts written and produced in a brief time period as a response to this latest "challenge," there's some good work being done here amidst the occasional unevenness.

About the author: Frankie Moran is a graduate of the 2008 NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at USC's Annenberg School of Communication. He was also a Phi Theta Kappa valedictorian at San Diego's own Mesa College and graduated from UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television. Frankie got his start in theater criticism writing reviews of Broadway shows during a short stint at Columbia University. Since then, he has written for the North County Times and the Las Cruces Bulletin.
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