‘Greater Tuna’ a lesser comedy
Published: November 22, 2009, 12:30 am
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Comedic targets don’t get much bigger than Texas.
As a region at least partly responsible for a great deal of the past decade’s frustrations, we can hardly blame the folks at the American Repertory Theatre of Western New York for focusing its dramatic energies on the Lone Star State and its manifold absurdities.
The company opened its production of “Greater Tuna,” a two-person comedy starring Thomas LaChiusa and Christopher Standart, on Friday night in the Main Street Cabaret.
“Tuna,” the first in a series of comedies by Jaston Williams, Joe Sears and Ed Howard, is a breathless and unwieldy piece of theater, chock-full of character-driven comedy that’s broader than the broad side of a Baptist Church. A little like the camp farces of Charles Ludlam with a pinch of self-seriousness, the play shoots for wacky ethnographical drama — “Our Town” on paint thinner, maybe — but settles on cut-rate sketch comedy.
LaChiusa and Standart, both gifted comic actors, take on a stupefying compendium of Texas nitwits, bigots and ne’er-do-wells.
As the play opens — to the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” no less — we meet a pair of blathering radio hosts (LaChiusa and Standart). They begin their newscast by regaling listeners for long minutes with all manner of gossip and goings-on around town before they realize that they’ve forgotten to switch on the power. Now—dag-nabbit!—they have to start all over again. This bit sets the humor dial at fair-tomiddlin’, where it remains for the rest of the show.
The writers have created an impressive mythology of the fictional Tuna, a town of a few hundred. It’s the sort of exaggerated landscape an insulated Manhattanite might dream up after a few too many martinis, a place peopled with easily lampoonable cartoons whose mental, physical and geographical shortcomings become so many giant balloons begging to be popped. And pop they do, one by one.
There’s the fur-coated, chain-smoking Didi Snavely, owner of the local used weapons depot; Petey Fisk, the meek president of the Greater Tuna Humane Society; and Elmer Watkins, head of Tuna’s KKK chapter. Then, of course, we have Bertha Bumiller, member of such organizations as the Better Baptist Bureau and “Fewer Blacks in Literature,” who is engaged in a crusade to remove certain books from the shelves of the local library. “Roots,” for instance, says Bumiller (played with refined bluster by Standart), “only shows one side of the slavery story.”
By the end of the first act, not unlike a promising “Mad TV” sketch gone disastrously over-length, “Tuna” loses most of the charm it built up for itself in the first few scenes. The second act is largely incomprehensible, either as comedy or drama. Most of that has to do with the script. What elevates this production beyond its script are the performances of LaChiusa and Standart, which manage to milk more laughs out of the script than it probably merits.
Theater Review
“Greater Tuna”
★★½
Comedy presented through Dec. 5 by the American Repertory Theater of WNY in the Main Street Cabaret, 672 Main St. For information, call 886-9239, www.artofwny.org.
cdabkowski@buffnews.com
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