- OTHER MEDIA
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- Listless menace traps couple. Then it goes sour.
- Reyhan Harmanci, San Francisco Chronicle (January 13, 2009)
- At one point, early in Maria Irene Fornes' powerful "Mud,"
Mae (played by Marilet Martinez) sneers at her common-law husband, Lloyd
(Alan Kaiser), "You're disgusting!" He shoots back, his face
slack, "No kidding."
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- It's a great moment in a play thick with tension and venom. Fornes,
a celebrated Cuban playwright whose experimental fare has earned her 13
Obies over the years, provides all the raw material in this script for
a night at the theater to feel like a punch in the stomach. If The Cutting
Ball's version doesn't hit quite so hard (maybe more like a slap in the
face), it still makes for an interesting evening.
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- The play has three characters - the aforementioned Mae and Lloyd and
an interloper named Henry (played with an appropriate amount of sleaze
by Garth Petal) - and one location: the kitchen. Mae, who irons clothing
for a living, is illiterate but going to school. She has a strong desire
to better herself but is locked into a highly dysfunctional relationship
with Lloyd, who suffers from some unnamed disease that makes him impotent.
The exact nature of their partnership doesn't come out until halfway through
the play, but from the get-go their relations are toxic.
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- Lloyd, listless and ignorant, is a drag, but Henry is something worse.
Mae brings him into the house for help in decoding a pamphlet on Lloyd's
disease (the list of symptoms is hilariously awful) and then invites him
to stay for "his mind." Henry's mind doesn't seem like much to
brag about, but he is older and does seem to know something of the world.
Looking sharp with slicked-back hair and a black leather vest, Henry is
more than happy to enter Mae's bed and be under her care. When a bad fall
makes Henry as damaged as Lloyd, Mae gets pulled down by two anchors, each
equally crushing.
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- While the exact location of "Mud" isn't specified, the feeling
is that it takes place in the South. Certainly, it's in a rural area, as
the talk of barnyard animals and the lack of education screams isolation.
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- But the characters of "Mud" only intermittently adopt accents.
For most of the time, their elocution is stunningly precise. The script
may contain elliptical dialogue, but the abstract presentation serves to
distance the audience from the characters. Martinez's Mae, in particular,
speaks much too well to seem trapped in a house with two losers. Kaiser,
as Lloyd, does a decent job of embodying a half-dead person, but it is
only Petal, playing Henry, who seems fully at home in his character. His
submerged violence feels genuinely menacing, even as the dark humor comes
through in Fornes' acerbic lines.
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- The pacing and staging are spot-on. With no intermission, the play
plows forward at a fast clip. Simplicity rules: minimal sound effects,
effective lighting, a well-designed set. As the three damned characters
continue on a collision course, Fornes skillfully keeps the exposition
to a minimum. The Cutting Ball, a company known for taking risks, makes
a wise bet on "Mud."
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