Whoosh! Like Marty McFly soaring back to the future in Doc’s plutonium DeLorean, I was instantly transported to my ‘60s alma mater, Lebanon Senior High School, while watching Mighty Acorn’s production of David Bunce’s “self-destructive comedy,” Red Maple. Why this show should zoom me back six decades to my theater past as if I’d eaten a backstage Proust madeleine, surprised me. Shocked me, I think.
Was it the insubstantial set? A gray blank wall hung with John’s (Craig Griffin, who yells too much) black-and-white photo enlargements and a small window near the front door of the condo. Was it the Good Will costumes or furniture that screamed, “this-is-all-we-could-afford?” It certainly wasn’t the acting from these five Houston professionals that put me in this nostalgic mood. This play needs them desperately, and they act up a storm to hide the play’s constant bumps from comedy to drama.
LSHS would never have produced this dramedy with its f-bomb expletives and masturbating references, but, scrubbed down, it might have. Our Senior Class and Tri-Class plays covered O’Neill one-acters, the beloved Life With Father, the anodyne Good Morning, Miss Dove, and the forgettable Harold. These were standard, acceptable dramas for us teen actors, and we performed them as if we were on Broadway. Redacted, Red Maple could have been one of these, although none of us thespians would have been old enough to carry it through.
Acorn’s actors carry it through like Sherpas, but the play’s a heavy load and ultimately lets them down.
Two couples, John and Karen (Griffin and Tracy Ahern) and Robert and Stephanie (Seán Patrick Judge and Elizabeth Black), both empty-nesters and best friends, meet in the 14th-floor condo of John and Karen’s for dinner. With their grown children out of the house, both couples have lost the marriage spark, and all have secrets they’re hiding from their spouses. Karen has moved out and wants a divorce; depressed Robert has hired a contract assassin to kill him.
This situation should be classic farce, and there are some glimmering hints of that here, but there’s also too much dramatic marital strife that stifles the comedy like a wet blanket. Bunce bounces between Neil Simon and Euripides. It’s ungainly, and we in the audience don’t know exactly when to laugh or when to be solemn. Some in the audience cackled throughout Act I as though it were a sitcom.
Even realtor Theresa/later Jennifer (Skyler Sinclair), who sneaks into the apartment at the play’s beginning has secrets to be exposed and a gigantic spoiler not to be disclosed (although I bet you’ll guess it from the get-go). That’s the main problem, I think, with Bunce’s play. It tries too many things at once – slapstick farce, then heart-wrenching pathos, impossible situations, with everything smothered in bumpy expository dialogue. How many times do characters ask a question and have it answered with the same question? The script needs a red pencil and the elimination of the intermission. It would move more smoothly as a one-act.
The actors cover the flaws with expertise, with Judge sailing over Bunce’s moguls like a male Mikaela Shiffrin. He grounds this play with comic intensity and truthfulness (when the playwright allows).
Mighty Acorn’s production is the fourth production of Bunce’s play since its premiere at Albany’s Capital Repertory Theatre (2019), and its regional popularity may keep growing. It is audience-friendly, has five distinct characters, one set, is a praise to marriage and forgiveness of past sins, and has plot twists in the second act that are clever if somewhat foreseeable. Even with age makeup and tons of powder in our hair, I don’t think we young thespians at Lebanon Senior High School could have carried this off. But while age-appropriate, I don’t think Mighty Acorn carries it off any better.
Red Maple continues through April 4 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 30 (Industry Night) at MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit matchhouston.org. $37.