Roulette
The words: hilarious, intelligent, disturbing and delightful, could be used to describe almost anything: life, marriage, teenage children, pet cats, politics or the economy.
In this case, they best describe the West Coast Premiere of Paul Weitz’s ROULETTE at the San Francisco Playhouse.
The play seems to have found the center of gravity of theater itself: it is situated midway between farce and melodrama and halfway betwixt comedy and tragedy.
If Mamet, Miller and Albee were the vertices of a triangle, then this seriously funny play by Weitz would be located at its centroid.
Before any actor has begun to “strut and fret his hour upon the stage” the audience is already engaged: admiring and coveting the marvelous stage design by Bill English.
MR English, in addition to being an award winning actor and director, is apparently an architect, interior designer, decorator, carpenter, handy-man and an artist.
Bill’s versatile set is elegant enough for a Noel Coward play and it makes a real home look like a set design for TOBACCO ROAD.
And then, there is the play: it is airtight: flawlessly executed yet without seeming mechanically rigid.
Director Susi Damilano has punctuated the play with the precisely choreographed exits and entrances of bedroom farce, and a brisk cadence which rightfully leaves the audience to do more thinking after the play than during the play.
The play is not necessarily an wholesale indictment of the American model of success, although it does point out the ironies and contradictions of the “hunter–gatherer” paradigm in a modern world.
Before departing for the office, paterfamilias Jon, treats himself to coffee, the morning newspaper and a round of Russian Roulette.
Assuming he wins at Roulette and beats the reaper, he grabs his briefcase and trudges off to the hunting grounds of corporate America.
As the cash cow that keeps the whole Aspidistra flying, Jon gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.
Jon’s wife, Enid, is caught in mid-life estrus and is trysting with puer eternis Steve: Jon’s friend and neighbor.
Jon’s rebel-without-a-clue, sixteen-year-old daughter Jenny is self-righteously dissing Dad and miss-directing her adolescent energies from high school academics to college level concupiscence.
His college son, Jock, sensing the world he is about to inherit, is slipping into pedestrian road-rage.
Just when you think things couldn’t get any worse for Jon, he loses a round of Russian Roulette.
Blame it on the bullet or blame it on Jon, but after the cranial bandages are removed, Jon seems entirely reluctant to step back into his old familiar traces and reshoulder his former yoke.
Instead, Jon enters a new chimerical, Scott Fitzgerald world: one of cruise ships, dapper evening attire, champagne, island paradises, jazz bands and snappy attentive bell hops.
Appropriately, his departure to a fractured la-la-land marks the arrival of everyone else in the muck of reality: Jock goes to work at Jon’s former office, Enid gives up motel rooms on the meter with Steve, and Jenny puts her father ahead of her hormones.
Obviously this play started with a great script, but it is sustained by great acting.
Bill English, whether acting or directing, adheres to the same exacting set of superlative thespian standards.
Mollie Stickney, who delightfully plays Steve’s wife: Virginia, is marvelous as the emotionally fried pixy who in the denouement opts for a simple nunnery over bourgeois suburbia and the neurotic pleasures of browsing catalogues and loading up the plastic.
Joseph Rende is absolutely hilarious as the totally wired Jock.
If you live anywhere north of the Panama Canal and enjoy quality theater, this play is a must.
For tickets to serious comedy, check the website at www.sfplayhouse.org or call the box office at 415 677-9596.