Posted on Sunday, 11.15.09
THEATER REVIEW
Review | 'Macon City: A Comic Book Play' is brought to life with creative glee
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IF YOU GO
What: ``Macon City: A Comic Book Play'' by Marco Ramirez.Where: Naked Stage production at Barry University's Pelican Theatre, 11300 NE Second Ave., Miami Shores, through Nov. 29.When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday (no Thanksgiving performance).Cost: $25 ($18 seniors 60 and older, $12 students).Info: 866-811-4111 or www.nakedstage.org.By CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com
Marco Ramirez is a wildly imaginative playwright whose writing acknowledges a fundamental reality: If you want to entice the under-30 crowd into experiencing theater, you'd better give 'em something exciting in a form that really speaks to them.
That seems to be the creative impulse behind Macon City: A Comic Book Play, a Ramirez piece that's getting a slam-bam first production by The Naked Stage.
Ramirez, a celebrated young writer who grew up in Hialeah and is now in his second year at New York's famed Juilliard School, has already written plays that pay tribute to horror movies and heavy metal music (Mr. Beast and Broadsword, both produced here by Miami's Mad Cat Theatre Company). His scripts play with form, draw on his own passions, and connect like crazy with both people who dig drama and kids who think of a theater as a place where movies are shown.
Macon City is Ramirez's attempt at melding theater and comic books. Drawing on the conventions of superhero comics like Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, the playwright concocts his own story about a ruined, soulless metropolis abandoned by the special beings who once kept it safe.
Life in Macon City, we swiftly see, is pretty awful. The place is run by a corrupt mayor (Hugh Murphy), who has just ``won'' election to a fifth term. He has some kind of mysterious deal going with a Dr. Wells (Alyn Darnay), a scientist driven mad by his beloved grown daughter's birth ``defect.''
HALF-RUINED FACE
The story's requisite villain is a guy named Grime (also played, with delicious relish, by Murphy), a man whose half-ruined face is so expertly altered by the mad scientist that he becomes the mayor's more demented doppelgänger.
Ramirez also provides two unlikely heroes: Frankie (David Hemphill), a shoplifter haunted by a recurring bad dream, and Jaime (Scott Genn), an amiable tweaker who obsessively collects weird stuff. Sticking the scenes together is a narrator Ramirez descriptively dubs Caption (Jasmine Fluker).
Naked Stage, a professional company based at Barry University, brings Macon City to life with such crazily creative glee that you can't help grinning as the production's surprises are revealed.
Antonio Amadeo's set, for example, at first seems to be a non-set, a gray space that you might mistake for the backstage area of Barry's small Pelican Theatre. But then doorway-sized boxes get opened, a mad scientist's crazily colorful realm appears, a damaged baby gets born in a ``hospital'' suggested by two actors simply holding a curtain above their heads. Thus, Amadeo and the audience become partners in imagining a world that would require millions of dollars to achieve on film.
DOUBLE DUTY
Director John Manzelli, who doubles as the production's lighting designer, expertly integrates the show's myriad elements, including Matt Corey's richly detailed soundscape and Leslye Menshouse's costumes, which include a stained lab coat for Dr. Wells and, for the transformed Grime, a getup that would turn Batman's Penguin green with envy.
Though Fluker needs to work on being a more dynamic narrator (and not swallowing her dialogue), the cast achieves the right tonal balance between playing comic book types and being real people telling an engaging story. As Grime, Murphy hits the play's most over-the-top role out of the park.
There is still some clarifying work to be done on the script, as even Ramirez might admit.
Even so, Macon City: A Comic Book Play makes for an exhilarating hour or so of boundary-pushing theater.
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