Carolyn Michelle Smith, Tina Benko, and Kathy Searle in WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! at Williamstown Theatre Festival There was a time when I fully subscribed to the notion, as Philip Barry often put forth in his lovely plays The Philadelphia Story and Holiday, that the rich should be looked upon with the same sympathy as all the other classes: “seen into and not through,” as the New Yorker’s late theater critic Brendan Gill once noted (in a tuxedo, no doubt). Or as John Guare put it in his great 1980s play Six Degrees of Separation, the rich are the same as us, “only living hand to mouth on a different level.” Wow, have times changed! With the advent of George Bush, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Mitt and Anne Romney, Anne Coutler, Rupert Murdoch, Paul Ryan, and their plutocratic overlords hungering (may be even poised) to take over every nook and cranny of American power this November, I’m siding more with the likes of playwright Katori Hall, whose scathing, liberating satire about the inherent racism and intolerance of said strata of society, WHADDADBLOODCLOT!!!, will close out the Williamstown Theatre Festival this week. Hall's broadside of the top 0.5 percent, and all who kow tow to them, is not always fair or totally on the mark. Harlem, for instance, is depicted as a dangerous, scruffy, and strife-ridden community filled with racial tension, which only made me wonder if the playwright had visited the area recently, or even checked today's Craigs List rental postings. Still I enjoyed every minute of this comedy; the whole experience is a joyful release. Despite its occasional lapses of judgment or observation, WHADABLOODCLOT!!! (it's the expression Jamaicans use when they acknowledge that everything is all screwed up) is truly of the moment. Trow 'em to to the dogs, I say. (Present company excluded, of course.)
Katori has created a more than solid hour and a half of dark comedy about the calamities of an especially noxious member of that society, Eden Higgenbotham, who, after suffering a sudden stroke while trying to prevent Beyonce from moving into her co-op building, wakes up from a coma with foreign accent syndrome. (Yes, it's a real, if rare, condition.) This leaves her able to speak only in a Jamaican patois and -- for her that worst of all possible nightmares -- having to sound black for the rest of her life. The actress playing the role, Tina Benko, is a Diane Keaton/Carole Lombard hybrid so ravishing and flawlessly lapidary in the role, her almost-constant presence onstage becomes the best part of the production. She is a complete delight from the first moment to the last. The currently politically correct viewpoint of the satire makes it possible for the playwright to do what others dare not, especially in front of a Berkshire audience: engage in the kind of politically incorrect class, social, racial, and sexual stereotyping considered a no- no in most forms of entertainment these days (save for South Park, perhaps). The naughty spectacle onstage, however, glides by excitingly, presenting a new, more honest world filled with oppotunities for such funny guilty pleasures. In addition to Benko's constant presence, good comic turns come one after another, but I especially liked Carolyn Michelle Smith in all her roles, from Higgenbottham’s amazed Jamaican nurse to the role of Beyonce herself. For a brief moment, when the newly liberated Higgenbottham makes a banker plead with her not to withdraw millions from his bank (after he makes an understandable mistake on the telephone stemming from her new accent), I almost went back to my old self, thinking “What happened to the ‘we’re all people’ ethos that the play had started to espouse?" Bankers are people too, right? But when she walks out with a Hefty trash bag filled with money, I couldn’t help thinking "Aw to hell with 'em."
WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! is very much of the moment. The1943 British farce See How They Run, beautifully produced and staged, and acted with spot-on comic timing and energy at Barrington Stage Company, is, despite all the running around, more cozily antiquated than spending a Sunday evening watching Britcoms on WMHT. This old locomotive of a comedy, hilarious when it's up and running full speed, if slow and sqeaky while turning corners, entertained Londoners in the middle of the horrors of Word War II –there’s even a silly Nazi running lose around the premises for the audeince to giggle at. (Talk about the cathartic power of comedy! ) And what does that tell ya? When people get traumatized, they do what they do now; watch something like Are You Being Served or The Golden Girls, or, in my case, shows like Web Therapy, Weeds, Veep, and Episodes. (In fact, observers might notice how closely See How They Run resembles, both in appearance and in the performances, one of the funniest of the older Britcoms, Keeping Up Appearances.) And who's to blame em? I’m heading under the covers right now and turning on the telly -- and certainly not to watch the evening news. – Scott BaldingerWHADDABLOODCLOT!!! at Williamstown Theatre FestivalBy Katori Hall Directed by May Adrales Starring Carolyn Michelle Smith, Tina Benko, and Kathy Searle Now through August 19 See How They Run at Barrington Stage Company, The Main StageBy Philip King Directed by Jeff Steitzer Starring Lisa McCormick, Michelle Tauber, Jeff Brooks, Michael Brusasco, Cary Donaldson, Keith Jochim Now through August 26
