METEOR SHOWER by STEVE MARTIN

 

Meteor Shower by Steve Martin. 

Directed by Chris Baldock. Assistant director Stephanie Evans, Stage Manager Rhiley Winnett. Lighting design. Rhiley Winnett. Sound design Chris Baldock.. Projection, sound and lighting operation Rhiley Winnett.  Mockingbird Theatre and Acting Studio. Belconnen Arts Centre.

Reviewed by Peter Wilkins

 

One thing that is guaranteed when you attend a Mockingbird Theatrics production is that you are certain to witness a finely staged production of a play that will entertain, provoke thought and surprise. This has been the case with Andrew Bovell’s When The Rain Stops Falling, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and most recently Steve Martin’s madcap, absurd and somewhat surreal Meteor Shower. Like Martin’s brand of zany comedy, the play is a ricocheting bullet of behavioural madness. The play is set in 1993 in Ojah California at the time of a forecast meteor shower.  For some inexplicable reason in a play that is full of inexplicability, Middle Class couple Corky and Norman decide to invite two people over to witness the meteorological event. Perhaps it is not so inexplicable when one considers that the host couple are uniquely odd. Corky, is a neurological firecracker with a rocketing case of ADHD. Norm plays along until the guests Gerald and Laura arrive on the scene and Martin lets his fanciful flight of delirious comedy light up the stage with meteoric madness.

Corky purposely invites the belligerent and aggressive Gerald to fuel conflict in the belief that that is the Velcro that will bind Norman and Corky in a truly adhesive partnership. But even she can’t expect the course of true intent to run smooth. In a series of scenes that switch back and forth in time and incident through blackouts the couples play out their idiosyncratic personalities, engage in Swinger’s fantasies and react to Norm’s fatal encounter with a meteor, or is it? BY the end of the play, director Baldock has Corky and Norm velcroed together, inseparable and glued in perfect matrimony. We could be led to assume that Corky and Norman’s experiment worked under the brightly illuminated sky.

Fans of Steve Martin’s style of comedy or those with a quirky liking for the absurd and the surreal  had a great night of laughter on the final night of Baldock’s snqppy and sharp production. Lovers of Ionesco’s Theatre of the Absurd and Edward Albee’s viperish Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf will appreciate the marital quips and jibes. Those keen to grasp the playwright’s meaning may be puzzled. Martin laces his satire with sitcom hilarity, and the discerning theatregoer may have to probe motive for meaning.

That aside, it is the production that makes the eighty minutes at Mockingbird’s studio theatre in the Belconnen Arts Centre a performance to remember. Director and designer Baldock has set his simple but stylish set within three sides and an upper level where the characters view the meteor shower and become entwined in sexual liaisons. There is an element of Hump the Hostess and Get the Guest on rhe outside area.

What is not confusing in the production is Baldock’s tight direction and the excellent performances of his small cast. Baldock’s casting of what appears to be actors of different ethnicity gives the production a distinctive individuality and character. There is not a weak link in the casting of Jess Beange as Corky. Sachin Nayak as Norman, Anto Hermida as Gerald and Maxine Eayrs as Laura. Nayak plays the straight guy with utter believability. Hermida is the ideal foil with his bullish bombastic attitude and Eayrs slinks with vampish allure.

But it is Beange who mesmerizes with her superb sense of timing and crackerjack grasp of comedic technique. Her wonderful control of erratically changing emotions in the most absurd circumstances is a meteor shower of artful comic performance. Beange appears to channel the great female comedians of the American sitcom. Any of the audience for Mockingbird Theatrics’ production of Meteor Shower who has witnessed performers like Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett or Lucille Ball would have recognized in Beange’s Corky a stellar comedic performance.

This production of Meteor Shower is another excellent example of the diversity of Mockingbird’s programming. If you have not made the trek to Mockingbird’s intimate studio theatre in the Belconnen Arts Centre, be sure to visit when next this imaginative company produces another high quality theatrical experience.