Not Meerly Fuddy

Just days ago, I asked for suggestions on what I should review next. I will get to those comments with a later post, but for now, it's back to my quest to review every production put on here at SMSU. Our theater (or theatre) department just put on David Lindsey-Abairre's Fuddy Meers. It was directed by Nadine Purvis-Schmidt.

It was good. It was quite funny and, at times, touching. For those of you readers who are unfamiliar with the show, the plot breaks down like this: Claire has amnesia. During the course of a day, she can learn all sorts of things and she'll remember it all until she goes to sleep. At that point it all slips away. She is whisked off to her mother's house by a limping man one morning. As the play progresses, we see her learn the true identities of everyone around her including her husband, son, mother, ex-husband, and a few others. The play follows the basic plot structure of a farce. The pace of the action is very fast, but unlike most classic farces, Lindsey-Abairre takes time to stop everything and allow his characters to come to terms with the craziness that surrounds them.

The nice thing about the script is that it is filled with interesting characters. The playwright managed to put lightning in a bottle with Gertie, Claire's mother who had a stroke and now cannot speak properly. She comes across as very real. She was played here at SMSU by Nissa Nordland and she was truly a joy to watch. In my review for A Body of Water, I talked about Nordland's struggle to portray her character's age, but there was no trouble here. She really threw herself into this character. I've seen Nissa in a lot of plays, and this might be the best performance I've ever seen her give. I don't mean to ignore the other actors in the show. Everyone did admirably. I wouldn't say that there was one person who gave a bad performance, but Nissa Nordland was unquestionably the show's MVP.

This play wasn't all sunshine and lollipops, though. It had some problems. There were issues with the sound. Sometimes it came in too loudly, sometimes it didn't come in when it was supposed to, sometimes the scene changes took longer than the sound cue that was supposed to accompany it. Which brings me to my next thing. Modern playwrights are crazy about scene changes. David Lindsey-Abairre is no exception it seems. It just killed me sometimes. I'm watching a really good scene, the pace is great, the audience is feeling it, the play is really picking up speed and momentum and then BAM! There's a blackout for a scene change and I'm sitting in the dark for two minutes. That kind of thing takes me completely out of the moment. That's more of a complaint about the script than anything, and that's where I need to head next.

While this is a good script, I have some real problems with it. Now, I said before that its strength was its characters, and that's true. But not all characters are created equal. There are seven characters in this show, and three of them are saddled with quirks to make up for their lack of substance. I'm speaking of Kenny (Claire's son), Heidi (a cop who isn't all that she seems), and, finally and most blatantly, Millet (an escaped convict with a foul-mouthed hand puppet). Kenny isn't as bad as the others. He has some great stuff at the end of the play, but in the beginning all he does is pout, say angry things and smoke pot. His big quirk is that he's seventeen but he's still in eighth grade (so funny! Oh, wait, no it isn't. It's quirkiness for the sake of being quirky). The thing with Millet is that he is a completely utilitarian character. He exists in the play to bring people into the other room so that private conversations can be held. That's all he does. So his character is made to seem cooler by adding the hand puppet (I will admit, when auditioning, I was taken in by the whole puppet thing. I genuinely wanted to play Millet. I was wrong and I'm very thankful that the director realized that I wasn't right for the role). You want to talk about quirky for quirky's sake? That's it right there. That's almost Seth MacFarlane levels of laziness. Fortunately, Lindsey-Abairre is a good enough writer that he can work around his own laziness and the actors in the production that I saw were all good enough that the play wasn't hampered by it too much. I realize I wrote a lot of words to describe a problem that didn't really bother me until well after I had left the show. Oops.

All in all, Fuddy Meers is a good show. Nadine Purvis-Schmidt directed it well and the entire cast gave solid performances. I had a few bones to pick with the script, but a good cast and a good crew with a good director (like we had here) can mostly overcome those complaints. Fun stuff.

Fuddy Meers: 3.5 out of 5 skulls
This Post: 2 out of 5 skulls

P.S. For those of you who did not see the show and are wondering why it is called Fuddy Meers:
As Gertie, the stroke victim, tries to jog Claire, the amnesiac's, memory, she talks about going to a funhouse and looking at the mirrors. The mirrors were funny. Funny mirrors with Gertie's particular speech impediment sound like fuddy meers.