The Death of Cupid doesn’t dilute Lysistrata
Cupid is on trial at the Living Room this month. It’s a bold move in the city that’s home to Hallmark and Russell Stover, but the Living Room’s third season has been nothing if not bold.
Writer and director Kyle Hatley’s folked-up Lysistrata reboot, The Death of Cupid, is a heady cocktail of dick jokes, blues licks and theological angst, brimming with local talent. It’s billed as a “whiskey musical,” a notion that seems a little disingenuous when the first bottle of the stuff doesn’t show up until Act II. But whiskey is a state of mind in Hatley’s Greece, where ambrosia-tippling gods recline in the heat, and a fedora-clad pit orchestra pours out saloon soul.
The play opens with narration from the Greek god Khaos, played and sung by the eminently capable Katie Gilchrist. The bloody Peloponnesian War is making new Athenian widows every day, and the women are sick with worry and tired of the violence. When Lysistrata (Megan Herrera) hears of her husband’s death, she bargains with Athenian and Spartan women alike to end the war.
Her strategy? Sex. More specifically, no sex. Her assembly swears to a full love embargo until the women’s husbands sign a peace treaty.
Fans of Lysistrata know what to expect from here: raunchy riffs, manic men and boners of comic proportions. But The Death of Cupid ramps up the classical comedy’s philosophical stakes. In Hatley’s show, the soldiers aren’t the only ones disputing Lysistrata. Her plan also earns the ire of the goddess Athena, then pisses off Aphrodite and her son, Cupid. When mortals tempt fate, the gods get fussy.
Vanessa Severo is equal parts fierce and tender as Aphrodite, flipping deftly between comedic feistiness and tragic sincerity with the speed that Hatley’s script demands. Daria LeGrand plays Cupid as a profane pepper pot who strings together obscenities as fast as he fires his arrows. Strong performances and vocals from Casey Scoggins (Hera) and Zachary Parker (Hades) round out the pantheon. Parker’s underworld number is a highlight of pure spectacle, with excellent choreography and blocking by Severo and Hatley.
The show’s most impressive technical feat (and future strike-crew nightmare) is its sandbox set design. The stage is covered in sand, adding texture to the lighting, cushioning the actors’ harder falls, and functioning as a terrestrial weapon when tempers flare. (Contact-lens wearers, you’ve been warned.)
Hatley’s script is full of tricky light- and sound-cue-driven gags, and stage manager Alex Murphy calls the show with impeccable precision. A few of the technical elements are less nuanced — the lighting leans heavily on a general wash of high-saturation magenta, and a cheesy echo effect on Gilchrist’s mic could be dialed back — but the production design bolsters the show’s playful feel.
That sense of play is true to the source material, and Hatley has further packed his Cupid with bawdy battle-of-the-sexes humor, including a brief PSA from the men on the medical legitimacy of “blue balls.” As Lysistrata’s army of scantily clad Athenians tease the sex-starved men with low-cut slips and pouty promises, the soldiers, led by Forrest Attaway’s chauvinistic Magistrate, reach their breaking point. Women are fickle, one of the dimwitted soldiers laments. “They’re made of three things: breasts and lies.”
Those zippy one-liners are clever, but as the mortals clash with Cupid, the show veers into darker dramatic territory. The farcical elements and weighty philosophical questions about free will and fate make for a tricky tightrope act. As Act II’s tense confrontations unfold, the rimshot antics of previous scenes can start to feel like another dramatic universe, but the ensemble mostly keeps its balance.
The musical numbers (given fine direction by Eryn Bates) help. Bittersweet updates of traditional spirituals, such as “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” show off the range of Cupid‘s seasoned performers.
The Death of Cupid is an ambitious, high-energy laugh machine with unexpected teeth, a testament to this local theater’s talent and willingness to take risks. Come for the clingy costumes and the dick jokes. Stay for the blues and the booze.
