Review
UNWRAP YOUR CANDY
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.
Hoochi-Doo Productions and the Sonoma Community Center are currently performing a very seasonally apropos collection of four one-act plays by Tony Award winning playwright Doug Wright.
They are collectively titled UNWRAP YOUR CANDY.
While much milder that Stephen King’s CREEP SHOW, the plays are ideal fare for Halloween and cool autumn nights.
Although they are billed as “deliciously macabre” and perhaps not “suitable for children or teens” it is possible that such descriptions and caveats are closer to hyperbole, hoopla and titillation, than to the objective truth.
Directors Cindy Brillhart-True and J. Anthony Martin have extracted some fine performances from a conspicuously talented cast.
The title piece, precariously close to real life, is about a theater audience assembled from Hades or the red states: you must decide for yourself.
Snoring, incessant cell phone conversations, obstreperous pagers and Philistines posing as aficionados of the stage, totally eclipse the action on the stage and would send the average theater patron scrambling for either the house manager or a refund.
Edwin Richards and Ken Bacon are two major assets to the show.
Each stage stalwart appears in several of the one-acts; they both grasp the concept and nuances of subtle comedy.
Colleen Fogarty, the mother of the talking fetus, puts forth a convincing performance and convincing rendition of a woman trapped in the schizoid chasm that passes between what she thinks she hears versus what the sane world hears.
And as the late night announcer for the amazing Ginzu knife used to say, “And that’s not all.”
For the duration of the show, if you buy your tickets from an authorized dealership or a scalper, the producers will throw in an additional one-act by none other than the greatest of our contemporary playwrights: Tom Stoppard.
Tom’s contribution to the collection is TEETH a vengeance piece which takes place in a jealous dentist’s chair.
It is one of Stoppard’s earliest pieces, stretching back to the sixties, before TRAVESTIES and long before he learned to abuse his audiences with prolix desiccated works such as THE INVENTION OF LOVE.