Speed Bumps

Steve Tesich won an Oscar for his screenplay for Breaking Away, that kooky little movie about the blond bicyclist who thought himself an Italian opera star. But where that piece had charm to spare, his Speed of Darkness, which is being produced by Northland Actors Ensemble, is puny and ponderous.

Set in 1991, the play centers on the strained marriage of Joe (Greg Butell) and Anne (Kathy Kane) while their daughter Mary (Ann Bell) is a senior in high school. Although Joe isn’t really Mary’s father (not that they’ve shared that with her), the two have a decent bond — except when Joe drinks. And there is a big hint early on — Scene 2, in fact — that something dark and tragic is around the corner, communicated by the actor (Joe Whalen) who appears in Scene 4 as Mary’s boyfriend.

Entering the fray is Lou (Terry Alan Jones), a vagrant who was once Joe’s Vietnam war buddy. There’s something interesting about him, though: He travels the world, visiting each city that is sponsoring a scaled-down model of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial. And he gets the play’s one decent line, about how birds and bums alike find comfort resting atop or near the sculptures of Henry Moore.

With Lou’s vague claim that he’s Mary’s godfather and Joe’s angst about not being her biological parent, Tesich mistakenly believes he ups the ante by having Mary carry around a sack of sand representing a baby for a class project. Sometimes a sack of sand is just a sack of sand.

Further weighing things down is the fact that Tesich’s casting suggestions must have been missing from director Teresa Fischer’s and assistant director Bonita Hansen’s scripts. The four main characters are all miscast; Kane could almost play Butell’s mother instead of his wife, Butell looks more like Bell’s husband instead of her father, and Bell hasn’t been in high school since Duran Duran was hot. Such choices might be excusable if the acting were any good. But even in the opening seconds, when Joe is so obviously, terribly distressed you think he must be contemplating murder-suicide, there’s a disconnection when it turns out he’s only worried because Mary is late returning from a date. And when one scene assertively hints that Joe has been a problem drinker, why does Anne grin from ear to ear when he later comes home raging drunk?

Before the play begins, the Arena Theatre is at least filled with the sound of vintage Creedence Clearwater Revival, and scene changes bring up Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and The Ronettes. But good taste in song selection doesn’t spill over to the uncredited costume design. When the aging highschoolers attend a ’60s-themed dance, Mary is dressed appropriately in a beaded green-and-white minidress while her boyfriend looks like an extra in the Brando biker movie The Wild One. It’s one more nail in this unattractive coffin.

Fringe benefits: Former Kansas Citian George Bennett is in the midst of his third year working some kind of angle for the New York International Fringe Festival. Two years ago he took The Metamorphosis from the Westport Coffeehouse to New York, and last year he consulted on Frankenclown, which later had a short run at Alanz Theatre before moving on to the Fringe Festival. On Sunday, August 26, his new original script, The Toothless Virgin, plays the last of six performances at the Sol Goldman Theatre on the festival’s closing day.

Bennett’s company is called Mouth to Mouth, and the play, he says, “was inspired by — and I know this sounds weird — a Balinese mask artist from Denmark who I studied with. It’s an impressionistic Gilligan’s Island gone mad, with a group of people waiting for this thing to extract them from their reality.”

Since one of last year’s entries, the superb Kurt Weill-like musical Urinetown, is moving to Broadway from the literal fringes of New York theater, attention has never been more rigorously focused on the 180 or so productions in this year’s Fringe Festival. “Urinetown gave the festival a lot of credibility,” says Bennett, a Rockhurst High School grad and former UMKC student. “And producers are really watching what’s happening.”

So is The New York Times, whose first review from the festival was of Debbie Does Dallas, a verbatim transposition of the 1970s porn classic to the stage. Though intercourse is not depicted, its “dialogue” and sound effects are. All this now that Late Night Theatre’s Old Chelsea home is on the chopping block.