The American Heartland pulls off a Perfect Wedding
Last Saturday morning, a few hours before I caught Perfect Wedding, the no-sex sex farce knocking them dead at the American Heartland Theatre, I suffered through 27 Dresses. On an airplane. Napping through much of it, wearing neither headphones nor my glasses, I still managed to keep track of time by noting the arrival of the junky plot points. They came like buses, each sluggishly punctual, designed less to tell a story than to ferry people to where they already know they were going. By the time what’s-her-name was marrying who’s-his-ass, I was as happy as the filmmakers wanted me to be: That climactic wedding meant we’d start descending into KCI any minute.
I bring this up for two reasons. First, exiting the Heartland after a show feels remarkably like deplaning. Second, we know better than to expect much from wedding-themed pop narratives. What a pleasure, then, to report that Perfect Wedding resolutely dashes the predictable and the cheaply sentimental. Writer Robin Hawdon and director Paul Hough offer up satire, robust silliness and such well-wrought farcical carryings-on that I’m surprised the intelligent-design crowd hasn’t adopted it as proof of whatever it is they’re always trying to prove. He takes a simple notion — on the morning of his wedding, a hung-over groom wakes up in bed with a woman who isn’t his betrothed — and taffy-pulls it for 90 minutes, laboring mightily to give the audience a tart, old-fashioned treat.
Before I get to the Heartland’s production, though, some business. First, I acknowledge the relative perversity of reviewing a show with only two weeks to go in its two-month run. I should also admit that, until last weekend, I had no intention of seeing it at all and that I dared to do so only after a pair of readers wrote in to (a) recommend the show and (b) call me out for not doing my damned job.
This jangled a nerve. I hadn’t written up a Heartland show in almost a year. My reasoning, when I started skipping, was simple. People need me to warn them away from shows such as A Dog’s Life like they need me to suggest they don’t lick hydrants. So I sat out a couple of unpromising shows, and then a couple with potential passed me by; soon enough, the Heartland and I were enjoying something like a common-law divorce.
That’s too bad. Sure, many Heartland shows are so shallow that you could pass out in them facedown with no risk of drowning, but most have their virtues: Kansas City’s top comic actors gliding through bright, light comedies, in front of unfailingly enthusiastic audiences, in a cozy theater run by professionals. The Heartland usually musters fun, if not great art. Plus, there’s a full bar. With a sour-mash chaser, the cornpone goes down much more smoothly.
Perfect Wedding boasts all these good points and almost none of the cornpone. (All the whiskey in the joint couldn’t wash away a recurring gag ripped from Groucho Marx’s old “leave in a huff” routine.)
As the conveniently aphasic groom, Bill (Darren Kennedy), tries to figure out what he might have done with Judy (Jessalyn Kincaid), the stranger in his bed, while keeping his fiancée, Rachel (Kristen French), in the dark, every lie turns into a whopper and every misunderstanding becomes a comic catastrophe. Pyrotechnic comic performances from John Michael Zuerlein, Heidi Stubblefield and Jan Chapman keep the madcap antics exciting instead of overbearing. As a put-upon best man enlisted in the cover-up, Zuerlein knocks even his straight lines into the comic bleachers. He tuttles around in a tux with full tails, elegant even in full panic mode, his face composed but his eyes ablaze. Zuerlein has a gentle touch and isn’t afraid to take his time in a hectic show; until the end, when the script throws him into full-farce craziness, he comes across as a reasonable person slowly going as mad as the world around him. His fracturing calm makes him an ideal foil for Stubblefield, who mashes her features into a yearbook’s worth of ridiculous faces, making the most of a character who seems capable of any emotion at any time.
As Bill, the groom who may have cheated, Kennedy doesn’t find much life until late in the show. Then, paired with Kincaid (graduating at last from comic scene stealer to superb leading lady), he’s part of the biggest surprise in a show made up of nothing but — somehow, once Hawdon contrives to get the possible mistress into the bride-to-be’s wedding dress, these two share a couple of tender, aching moments.
By the end, after Hawdon has paired and re-paired the principal couples as though he’s running them through a volleyball rotation, he finishes with a broadside against this age of competitive nuptials. It was all so peculiarly involving that, by the second act, I hardly needed to numb any of it with whiskey. Coolest of all, the crowd was feasting on the silliness, actually whispering “Oh, no!” or “This won’t be good” as each complication mounted. Here’s some fun: Ask anybody who sat through 27 Dresses but hasn’t made it out to Perfect Wedding if they even remember what it’s like to do that in a theater. In a church, sure, as friends make their mistakes at the altar — but in a theater?
