Viva la Vega
The Coterie Theatre’s inspired idea for staging Zorro steers clear of calling its hero “The Gay Blade” and then making good on the flamboyant nickname. It is, after all, a children’s theater. Director Jeff Church sets the show in a theater 100 years ago and makes it a production by the fictitious Hatchford and Ramsey Theatrical Players, whose signs announce that ladies “without escorts are cordially invited” and gentlemen are asked to “refrain from smoking, spitting and profane language.” It’s a nod to theatrical history that is at once educational and functional while masking the camp aspects of the hero’s macho posturing.
Michael Price Nelson adapted the play from the 1949 works of Johnston McCulley, a police reporter who wrote a series called The Curse of Capistrano. “Zorro” is the swashbuckling alias of Don Diego de la Vega (Chris Hatch), who is hunted by Colonel Corti (Shad Ramsey, who plays the title character on alternate days). Corti and his underlings, Sergeant Garcia (Sergio Alvarado) and Corporal Gomez (Richard Stubblefield), have declared that de la Vega is a murderer and a thief; de la Vega wears the unenviable badge of the falsely accused.
He goes on the lam with Padre Mateo (P. Jonathan Escobio), retreating to the home of some old neighbors, Señor Romero (Will Manning), his Señora (Natasha Charles) and their daughter, Rosa (Jenn Miller-Cribbs). These acquaintances know de la Vega only from his non-Zorro persona — they know him so well, in fact, that they publicly avow his cowardice. But they have heard of the mysterious bandito creeping through the black of night.
Most of the play takes place in the Romero home, which is besieged by an inquisition headed by the smarmy Corti and his bumbling aides. Though there’s plenty of swordsmanship on display, Zorro brands only one Z — across a tree during the play’s first sixty seconds — before the whole autographing thing is dropped. It doesn’t matter, because the real story is one of misidentification and the revenge of a boy for his dearly departed dad. The play offers adventure, intrigue, and a spark of romance in the playful repartee between de la Vega and Rosa.
The show is this year’s annual coproduction of the Coterie and the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Actors in Training program, so the cast is composed of third-year MFA students. Despite the program’s assertion that “the actors are marking their professional Kansas City debut,” some have appeared at the Unicorn Theatre and the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. (Natasha Charles played the lead in the Unicorn’s In the Blood, her real professional debut.) Past classes have performed rather inconsistently in this venue (one show a few years back made me question the entire program’s recruitment efforts), but this team is among the most talented.
The action unfolds under the guise of melodrama, and some of the actors play up the white-hat-black-hat silliness of that style with aplomb. Others, notably Charles and Manning, portray their characters more somberly. Those varying approaches could have clashed, but the production is surprisingly smooth. And just offstage is the young Luke Miller, playing the Sound Effects Operator. He’s as much fun to watch as the main-stage cast, manufacturing the clip-clop of horses, the crunch of nearing soldiers’ boots, and even a growling hungry stomach. As a member of the Hatchford and Ramsey Theatrical Players, he even mouths Zorro’s lines at times, giving a potentially invisible part the heart of a struggling stagehand who dreams of a spot out front.
Rebecca Eastman’s costumes are broadly rendered yet entirely accurate, and Gary Wichansky’s set is an astute homage to a crude little vaudeville house. Martin English and William Warren offer fight choreography in which the sound of steel against steel cannot be fake. The actors have as much confidence with their weaponry as they do in their storytelling.
Postscript: Fans of Quentin Tarantino hear talk of Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink and know immediately the conversation is about Reservoir Dogs, the ultraviolent indie that put the director on the map. Not content to let sleeping dogs lie, actor and writer Christian Middleton has turned the script into a play that will be given a staged reading at 8 p.m. Monday, February 17, at the Empire Room, on East 31st Street. And because he perceives “a shortage of male actors” in town, the movie’s Big Bad Eddie may become Big Bad Betty.
The reading is the first in what Middleton hopes will continue as the Cold Read Series. The idea grew partly from the tepid response to his production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth last December at the Madrid. “That didn’t work out so well,” he says, “so I thought I’d start small with a relaxed reading. I also thought that the various arts groups in town — the writers groups, the film people, the theater people — were so segregated. I wanted everybody to get in the same room.”
Middleton downloaded the script from the Internet and thought it lent itself to the theater. “There is a lot of dialogue, and you can, with good lighting, get away with one set: the warehouse. The rest could be done in flashback or in talking to the audience, like the stage version of Six Degrees of Separation. I also picked it not so much because I wanted to turn it into a play but to get some run-off audience, people who might not participate in the arts but know Reservoir Dogs.” He says he’s also looking for future projects from up-and-coming writers.
The staged reading, which will be directed by Mariah Andrews and will feature Middleton’s Youth costar Chris Wright, is free and open to the public. Drinks, however, are the responsibility of the audience.
