81. THE
CHEATERS CLUB
Back
in 2006 my family and I took a cruise ship vacation to Mexico. On the way it
stopped at Key West where we joined one of those haunted house tours. These
take you to sites associated with notorious deaths while the tour guide asks if
you see any “orbs” floating around in your photos; these supposedly are nearby wandering
souls. For months after that we thought we saw orbs in many pictures we took;
more likely, they were created by lens dust. Derek Ahonen’s new play, THE
CHEATERS CLUB, produced by the Amoralists at the Abrons Arts Center (at the venerable
Henry Street Settlement), uses such a tour to bookend a Southern Gothic story of ghosts and
spirit possession in the city of Savannah, Georgia. Like many old southern
cities, Savannah does a flourishing trade trying to scare out-of-towners to
death.
Henry Street Settlement, Henry Dejur Theatre, Grand Street.
The program notes
discuss a particular night that allegedly occurs in Savannah every 333 years. The
night is called Geist Übernachtung and
“the last documented occurrence . . . was in the year 1680,” which would make 2013
the year the next one would appear. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of this
story, since the Internet fails to list a single mention of Geist Übernachtung. It does state, though,
that Savannah is “America’s most haunted city,” and the names of numerous ghost
tours available there are listed. So it’s likely that Geist Übernachtung, which probably means something like “overnight
with ghosts,” is the playwright’s concoction, designed to support his freewheeling
and absurd (but not absurdist) plot. According to his notes, the legend of Geist Übernachtung holds that on this night “the barriers between
the natural and supernatural worlds are temporarily dissolved and the
disembodied spirits of the wandering dead may easily cross back into the realm
of the living.” This allows for situations that involve spirits taking
possession of anyone, dead or alive, if a medium performs the proper rituals.
Left to right: Bryan Anthony, Matthew Pilieci, Jordan Tisdale, David Nash (at rear), Sarah Lemp, and Kelley Swindell. Photo: Russ Rowland.
Much of the auditorium seating is
unused, probably so the empty seats (mostly in the side sections) are covered with cheesy
cobwebs like those you see decorating houses on Halloween. The conventional
proscenium stage is provided with a red curtain, hiding the scenery until the
play proper begins. In a sort of prologue played in the auditorium and before
the curtain, a Mephistophelian tour guide, Vladimir Anton (Zen Mansley),
introduces us and two corny tourists (Janette Johnston and David Lanson) to the
local ghostly lore, but even before the curtain rises we get a taste of how the
play will try to blend farce and spookiness when the flamboyantly theatrical Vladimir
refers to his landmark Off-Broadway production of a one-man "kabuki UNCLE VANYA,"
signaled by karate chops. This kabuki UNCLE VANYA, unfortunately, becomes a
running gag almost whenever Vladimir is on stage. (There’s a similarly misguided
kabuki-karate conflation in AVI HOFFMAN’S STILL JEWISH AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.)
When, at last, the curtain rises, we
see Alfred Schatz's rather elaborate, if clumsy and not particularly attractive setting, of a
hotel, with a small lobby area down right, the hotel’s saloon occupying most of
stage left, and three bedrooms on a second level joined by an outside corridor.
The rooms (as well as the lobby) have front walls covered in scrim so that
lighting makes them either transparent or opaque. (If you’ve ever seen pictures
or a production of DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, you’ll have an idea of what the
bedrooms over the saloon look like.) Scenes played in and near the stage left bedroom are partly blocked by poor sight lines, and I was seated dead center. These facilities will be used by a band of
four talkative tourists from New York, three of them siblings: a brashly profane guy,
Tommy (Matthew Pilieci), his gay brother, Jimmy (Byron Anthony), and their foxy
sister, Cathy (Cassandra Paras). The quartet is rounded out by their somewhat
shy black friend, Vonn (Jordan Tisdale), a newcomer to the siblings' Cheaters Club, so-called
since each is married and they’ve come to Savannah on an annual pilgrimage (a different city every year) to engage in extramarital
dalliances. Soon enough, they encounter the
Chaney family, headed by Mama (Sarah Lemp), the proprietor of the Chaney Inn, a
good-looking, speed-talking, garrulous middle-aged Southern belle with a Georgia accent as thick
as Spanish moss. Then there are her seemingly catatonic son and assistant, Lee
(James Rees), whose Lurch-like behavior inexplicably vanishes as the play
progresses; her other son, the straight-faced gay bartender Lawrence (David
Nash); and her daughter, the sexy barmaid cum cabaret singer Lana (Kelley Swindell). Nor must
we forget the hotel’s domestic, a voodoo woman named Ola May (Serena Miller),
who figures significantly later on. Lots of townspeople walk by or frequent the
bar. The number of characters (leads and supporting) who scream their lines, use vulgar language, or
behave obnoxiously makes one wonder if they haven’t been taking lessons from
the cast of SCARCITY, which I saw the day before.
Terrible things happen to the Cheaters
Club members in the first act. In act two of this two-and-a-half-hour effort (and I do
mean effort, for both those on stage and those in the audience), the club
members’ spouses come down from New York to find out what happened to their
loved ones. These additional instruments in the orchestra of blaring caricatures
are Jimmy’s wife, Susan (Vanessa Vaché); Cathy’s husband, Pat (Wade Dunham);
Jimmy’s husband, Charlie (James Kautz); and Vonn’s white wife, Linda (Anna
Stromberg). By the end of the play we will have had lots of lightning and
thunder effects, lamps flashing on and off, smoke and green lights, strobes, furniture
bobbing up and down, an open tomb from which multiple corpses are removed,
spirit possession, resurrections, and bundles of exposition to help clarify the
muddy complications of Mr. Ahonen’s bloated plot. (The elaborate lighting is by Brad Peterson and the eerie sound effects and original music by Phil Carluzzo. Niiamar Felder is responsible for the many costumes.)
A great deal of work has gone into THE
CHEATERS CLUB, which Mr. Ahonen also directed, but its exaggerated style
and complete lack of nuance grow increasingly hard to take, and, for all the
hoary thrill-house effects, the only fear one feels is that this exercise will
never end. Despite the play’s title, the Amoralists have not cheated when it
comes to casting, and no one appears to double in any roles. The most memorable
moment comes during the curtain call when the 26-member cast lines up across
the stage on both levels. It was memorable as well because it meant the show
was over.
