Review: “˜Summertime’ a sizzling sensory experience of love, lust

“Summertime,” now playing at Macgowan Little Theatre
through Feb. 7, is the quintessential Charles Mee concoction.

One part piña colada and two parts bordering-psychotic
fever dream, the maverick playwright’s kinky-sexy tribute to
love and the power of passion is unapologetic and relentless in the
way it peels away at each layer of the mystery of what it is to
feel and live with an utmost fullness of being.

Whatever that means.

But meaning isn’t important here, as much as simply
feeling.  If the audience walks away from the theater not so
much enlightened, but more awed with a sense of the sublime, then
co-directors Mel Shapiro and Brian Kite have succeeded in capturing
and conveying the essence of the moment.

On Saturday night, the audience was bemused, often repulsed, but
they laughed and roared, some cried and many gasped. And when it
was over, there were questions asked and few ready answers. Fuzzy
logic reigned, and emotions ran high. Mee, Shapiro and Kite would
have had reason to smile.

Not that the playwright was present to witness this triumph of
essence over form. Mee called in sick, as the audience was to learn
after the show, and the promised Q&A, which would have been a
nice way to round off a heady night of high-camp and existential
discourse, vanished into the ether. The play, however, was left in
good hands.

Shapiro and Kite have mastered an almost instinctual feel for
the material, hitting all the right notes in all the right places.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise, since both directors
have dabbled in Mee on past occasion to notable success, not least
Shapiro’s “Big Love,” critics’ darling
during its run at Venice’s Pacific Residence Theatre last
year.

The plot of “Summertime” is wafer thin. But again,
the plot’s not the point. Hence, giving it away is of little
consequence ““ basically, boy meets girl (i.e. James, played
by a suitably Chekhovian Michael Pappas, meets Tessa, a polished
Julia Willcox, resplendent whether in sweats or lingerie). The
problem is the two can’t get it on. More specifically, the
problem is Tessa. The poor girl is wrecked with doubt caused in no
small part by her weird and wonderfully dysfunctional family and an
ensuing cast of family friends and lovers. And, boy, does this
family love and lust.

The play is comedy as farce, but also comedy in the Dantean
sense of the word. Hence, while the fun in the sun ensues, the
subject matter often veers off into the darkest of sunspots.
Another way of looking at “Summertime” is to see the
play as a series of monologues ““ essential dots connected by
lines of peripheral action. It’s here where practically each
and every member of the ensemble takes his or her turn to rule the
roost. Even the psychotic pizza delivery guy (Dorian Logan), a
multiple-murderer who expounds upon the beauty of self-forgiveness
as he teeters on the brink, gets his due. And here, the excellent
cast, cliché characters and all, burns brightest.

Kahlil Joseph as the gigolo François, male striptease and
all, exuded prodigious presence. Michael Agrusso, a late addition
to the action, threatened an almost show-stealing turn as the
hilarious German man-child philosopher and would-be lover,
Günter.

But if a crown must be bestowed, then it must go to the
statuesque, implosively explosive Kourtney Kaas, as Maria, mother
to Tessa and blessed deliverer of the mother lode of virtuoso
acting.

Played against an exquisite backdrop of delicately framed
orange-tinged roses, and a stage sparsely dressed with white
muslin-covered pieces of furniture, including a well-tuned baby
grand, “Summertime” simmers with the sultry warmth of a
Tuscan summer, but plays with all the pace and jagged rhythm of a
juiced-up jack-hammer.

Like Chekhov on speed.

““Alex Wen