By Carol Davis
SAN DIEGO — Can you imagine being kidnapped by robots? No? Neither can I. Because from the looks of things in playwright Elizabeth Meriwether’s off the wall play Heddatron, a San Diego premiere, the five robots twirling about the stage at ion Theatre Company just don’t listen to reason. Well, why would they? They’re programmed, after all, to do one task and on the opening night performance I attended they did it to perfection, thank you very much.
It could have been hit or miss according to artistic director Claudio Raygoza who quipped, before the performance began, that the running time of the show was 75 minutes…or three days depending on whether the mechanical geniuses were up to snuff or have a breakdown as they did just before the first scheduled opening night performance was about to take place.
Back to the kidnapping and this is where it gets tricky and rather weird. According to Meriwether she “only writes when she feels mischievous.” She must have been really feeling full of it when she penned this odd duck of a play. In it we find a depressed and very pregnant and unhappily married Jane Gordon (Monique Gaffney) folding her laundry in her living room apartment. Next we see her reading Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler about an unhappily married woman. Lurking behind her two robots try to seduce her and convince her to come with them.
The next thing we know she’s missing and Jane’s husband Rick (Nick Kennedy), claims to the Film Student Evan Kendig that she was abducted by alien robots and taken to the Ecuadorian rainforest. It seems neighbors thought they saw robots leave the house that afternoon. OK, sometimes guys will go to great lengths to rationalize why wives leave home. This one takes the cake!
Back a the ranch in Ypsilanti, Mich., Jane’s home town, her twelve year old daughter Nugget (Zoe Turner Sonnenberg) is giving an oral book report on… badda boom, the life of Henrik Ibsen, the very same playwright who wrote Hedda.
“Hedda Gabler is about a woman named Hedda Gabler. She is sad and angry and pregnant. And she is sad and angry and shoots herself. She got married to a man she didn’t love because he bought her a house. This play taught me not to marry a man who buys me a house,” so says Nugget in her own inimitable way.
Flash backward to 1890 where we meet Henrik Ibsen and his wife Suzannah (Charles Peters and D’Ann Paton both too funny for words) having a meal together where Suzannah is reading the latest reviews of Ibsen’s A Doll House. At the table we find that Henrik is playing with his food and in between reading the paper Suzannah orders him to stop playing with the raisins in his food. (“Hello, we have a freak at our table”)
Soon their newly hired sexy kitchen maid Else (Amanda Vitiello) comes in catching Ibsen’s eye and turns his world upside down. (“You remind me of my mother”) But that doesn’t stop him from playing with his doll figures. While all this is going on, Ibsen’s rival August Strindberg (Sven Salumaa) drops in to aggravate Ibsen and while there has a little tryst with Suzanna and Else. Wow, can it get any nuttier?
Flash forward to Ypsilanti where Rick and his gun totting brother Cubby Gordon (Noah Langton) continue making their video with Film Student to plead for Jane to come home. They think they have uncovered clues placing Jane in the rainforest.
Before we know it Rick and Cubby, armed to the hilt looking like Rambo figures, storm the rainforest (or as the Film Student calls it the Roboforest), where they find Jane and the alien robots going through a similar reading of their own version of Hedda Gabler. She has, in fact been kidnapped by the robots as they lead her to their pad in the forest.
The aliens, we discover are fans of Ibsen’s play. They are also very much in control of the situation as we watch them performing the play with Jane as Hedda and they play all the other roles. Easily distracted, Jane is coaxed on by Aunt Julie-Bot’s (Trina Kaplan) robotic voice: “Good Morning. Hedda dear. How good to see you” (x2) while tryingto keep Jane focused in her role as the lead character in their version of the 1890 play.
I could go on, but this play is one best served by seeing for yourself because a little more than halfway through when the robots finally roll on to the stage, it’s almost indescribable. Now the focus is on the mechanical creatures all five of them living in this delightful rainforest where the Bot’s rule rule and it is a snicker a minute.
High Tech High student Matthew Alexander designed all five, and Brendan Cavalier, Paul Geantil, Evan Kendig, Pete Kennally and Claudio all had a hand in the construction of the robots with Paul Geantil engineering the whole thing. Two of them are Amazon looking androids dressed appropriately by Glenn Paris and Trista Roland,
Billy-Bot looked like it was coming straight at me. Actually it was a dishwasher in its former life and is now equipped with blinking eyes, flapping arms made from dryer hoses and tools around almost out of control. Two little teeny ones, looking like remote controlled cars, rolled out; one with a maid’s feather (Berta-Bot), another with a suitcase and judge’s wig (Judge Brack-Bot). Really! It’s all so sci-fi, and funny in a strange way that missing it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as seeing it.
Overall, the production is fun to watch but is a bit uneven among the real folks. The robots do just great. Monique Gaffney is definitely distracted as the depressed housewife, but puts little energy into Jane. The scenes with Nick Kennedy her wishy-washy husband are remote and overdone. As adorable and precocious as Ms. Sonnenberg is as she narrates the show, her diction could be a bit more enunciated. These are minor adjustments that by now will be taken care if. That said, the whole Ibsen take is about as funny as one can get poking at Hedda Gabler and mixing it up with robots that idolize her.
So there ya go.
See you at the theatre.
Dates: through March 31st
Organization: Ion Theatre@BLKBOX
Phone: 619-600-5020
Production Type:
Where: 3704 Sixth Ave in Hillcrest
Ticket Prices: $10.00-$29.00
Web: ionthratre.com
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Davis is a San Diego-based theatre critic. She may be contacted at carol.davis@sdjewishworld.com