Review: Desperately Seeking the Exit (Peter Michael Marino)

Over Magner’s cider and bong hits, writer Peter Michael Marino came up with one of those ideas that seemed perfect in the moment: a musical comedy based on the hit Madonna movie Desperately Seeking Susan, with a jukebox score from Debbie Harry’s back catalogue. Unlike most concepts formed under the influence, Marino’s dream didn’t go up in smoke. Instead, it came to fruition, with all the big names on board and a 2007 London tryout pre-Broadway. It seemed too good to be true…and, of course, it was.

To raise funds for the NYC Frigid Festival, Marino performs his hour-long solo show about his brush with theatrical disaster, Desperately Seeking the Exit, its title taken from one of the less-than-charitable reviews of the musical. He chronicles his project’s quick, meteoric rise and long, drawn-out death rattle of a rehearsal process. His excited Anglophilia and desire to own his own house with the riches that were sure to follow the musical's premiere became tempered by the sobering realization that each creative person seemed to have a different conception of what the show should be.

Marino speaks conversationally and animatedly, gesticulating with a can of Magner’s to punctuate his tirade. Mistakes happen, but as he says, this is live, and it just adds to the charm. He lets the audience watch unmuted if they desire to encourage real-time laughter and feedback, and with a limited audience, this didn’t lead to any disruption.

Some of the observations run toward the obvious – that the British like to drink tea, for example – but there are other moments of hilarity, including how many things New Yorkers take for granted that don’t translate between cultural contexts.

The show is at its best when it’s examining the heartbreak of seeing your creation twisted until you don’t recognize it anymore, and then being blamed for a result you never envisioned. It’s something akin to a parent no longer understanding their own child – who is currently being tried publicly as an adult.

It’s a powerful example of the importance of a unified vision, communication, and (dare I say) dramaturgy in this most collaborative of arts. The commentary runs like a dramaturg’s handbook, and one wonders where the dramaturg was in the room. Instead, as the set of creatives furthered their own individual artistic development, they seemed to forget the project itself, leaving the staging stagnant and draining the whimsy that was its main purpose. It’s a classic story of pride coming before a fall, implying that sometimes it’s okay to let a fun show just be fun, without looking for a greater importance.

The backstory also reminds potential reviewers and theatre patrons that a writer may not have complete control over what is presented in the end. However, the desire to blame doesn't only come from the audience, and it’s evident here in the text; as Marino airs grievances with the rest of the members of the creative team, I did find myself wondering what the choreographer or director’s take on the events and result might have been. 

Mostly, though, the take-away message is that everyone involved in a show is a human being with feelings, and that there’s a difference between constructive criticism and a gleeful takedown for page-views. On this human scale, Marino feels overly responsible for those who his show employed but also rapidly unemployed, showing the economic and personal impact of the gamble of show business. As we witness the current fallout from COVID-19's shutdown of all physical theatres, this observation gains a new, upsetting relevance.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. As recounted, the experience was clearly a learning experience of some value, and a twist later on lends the hour some positivity. While the memories are still painful, the wounds from the experience are less fresh, and are delivered more as comic cautionary tale than angst-ridden confessional. It’s certainly a diverting and breezy way to fill an hour; just remember to bring a bucket to catch all the dropped names.

If a show about failure can be a success, this is it.

Details:

Desperately Seeking the Exit will be performed May 31^st and June 8^th at 7:00PM, and June 4^th at 9:00PM, as part of an online Cincy Fringe event.

Tickets are $10-15 with a $1 fee, and can be purchased online.

The show includes mature language and content. Marino also performs an online children’s show; details here.

Photo courtesy of PeterMMarino.com

Review: Mr. Marmalade (Outside the March, site specific)

Mr. Marmalade (by Noah Haidle) is a play about children. But it is not a play for children, kindergarten classroom setting and free juice boxes notwithstanding.

Lucy has an imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade, with whom she plays an increasingly disturbing game of house- when he can fit her in to his schedule, that is. Lucy’s world is one of loneliness and loss, and this is channeled into the neglect, insult and injury she imagines Mr. Marmalade perpetrating. Mr. Marmalade justifies its seemingly wanton abuse of a four-year-old when it grounds itself in reality, making us understand that the imaginary friends are rooted in twisted recreations of scenes from the world that Lucy has experienced and continues to experience at the hands of her irresponsible mother and absentee father.

The most important aspect of this production by Outside the March theatre is its site-specific nature; the audience is led back and forth between two sides of a large kindergarten classroom at Holy Family Catholic school. There are all sorts of Easter eggs in the décor, so make sure you read everything on the walls, as there’s no way some of the vocabulary words and pictures are from a Catholic kindergarten! Most of what we see turns out to be relevant to plot or theme, amazing when the place is as busy as an actual kindergarten. The direction by Mitchell Cushman is full of wonderful surprises; actors pop out from where you least expect them to, the action sometimes continues outside. (An actor managed to pop out from right behind me and I had no idea how he got there.) The whole thing is stuffed with wonderful visual treats. Kindergarten things are used to stand in for adult objects in hilarious ways, and the temptation to play is strong (and largely encouraged, if it’s not disruptive). The audience finds new and interesting ways to settle itself as the actors perform scenes around and through it. If you sit down, you may find yourself next to a scene or have to move out of the middle of it. Scenes are introduced via storybook by our guide, Julie Tepperman, who helps us follow the action.

Lucy isn’t the only one having a bad time. When her mother leaves her to wait for the babysitter, the vacant teen’s boyfriend brings his brother, a suicidal toddler. The more experienced beyond their years and disconnected these children are, the less they seem to want to live in a world full of pain and loneliness. For children, historically and throughout literature, the only escape available is the imagination, but even that seems to be out to get them.

This isn’t to say that Mr. Marmalade is a miserable play. It’s funny and adorable; it just happens to be immensely disturbing. The humour comes with the juxtaposition between childhood innocence and the adult world of an imaginary friend who has not only a personal assistant, but a taste for alcohol and drugs. As the encounters get more and more harsh, the giggles give way to a much more difficult time, more so when Lucy’s emotional trauma becomes manifestly clear. We go from being engaged, to becoming more distant when things get truly appalling, to coming back again for the very human ending.

Mr. Marmalade is full of twists and turns, and has an ending much like the end of the last Lord of the Rings movie: there are at least three of them. You find yourself tricked by yet another conclusion. While this can be frustrating, it’s obvious from the message of the play that Lucy needs to free herself from all the trappings of adult life to really heal; she must get rid of all of her layers of playing doctor and house (though not Dr. House) so she can be a kid again.

 Amy Keating, as Lucy, and Ishai Buchbinder, as fellow pre-grade-schooler Larry, do some excellent, believable work as small children at varying degrees of precociousness. They never stray into preciousness, but instead capture the amorphous, loose and slightly dangerous feeling of being a child.

Katherine Cullen does triple duty as mother, babysitter and imaginary friend, but does her best work as the bored teen. She manages to completely remove the giveaway light of thought behind her eyes, and is pitch-perfect in distraction and vocal inflection, particularly when she reluctantly pulls out a make-believe game from her past. Philip Riccio as Mr. Marmalade is a perfectly charming psychopath, a proto Patrick Bateman, and Sebastian Heins as his personal assistant Bradley gives us an “adult” we can actually root for, with a mix of damaged and effusive warmth. In a way, Bradley (and in particular his entrances and exits) reminds me very much of Angels In America’s Mr. Lies.

Costumes are particularly effective in accentuating character. Mr. Marmalade’s reformation from black suit to white becomes a white wifebeater – showing that costume colour isn’t everything; the change must come underneath, and it hasn’t. Lucy and Larry wear hilariously oversized “adult” clothes when “house” is played, emphasizing how young they are. Lucy wears too-big high heels and a “little black dress,” but leaves her pink poufy dress poking through; not only does it resemble a cottontail rabbit, but it shows how ill-fitting the role is (as do Larry’s clothes, which keep falling off). It also solves the problem of the dress suddenly revealing the actress as the woman she actually is. Sound design helps, too, by mostly using “instruments” found in a kindergarten classroom.

The room itself is not air-conditioned and is likely to get stifling hot. But, as the juice boxes come out and humour and sadness do a captivating square dance, you’re not likely to mind too much.

-Ilana