screwmachine/eyecandy

The game show as metaphor for everything that’s fouled up and greedily consumerist in America is a bearded theatrical trope. If a playwright decides to have at it one more time, he or she had better do so in a way that really wows audiences. J. C. Hopkins, who wrote screwmachine/eyecandy Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Bob, has no fresh ideas to offer, so the 75 minute show crawls by.

Hopkins gives away the end of the piece from the moment that gasket salesman Dan Brown (Bill Coelius) and wife Maura (Nancy Walsh) are discovered behind two lecterns on Simon Holdsworth’s cartoon-living-room set. To tell the truth, the mock quiz show’s printed program — gotten up to look blood-spattered — gives away the denouement even before the show begins. When Lauren Phillips’s bright game-show lights flare up, there are Dan and Maura, pretending to be giddy with expectation — just as so many other actors in this kind of play have pretended to be and have made the same acting choices.

Only seconds after we see the Browns rolling their eyes and clasping their hands like the dimwits that playwright Hopkins thinks we all are, host Big Bob (David Calvitto) appears in costume designer Ronnie Dorsey’s black suit, shirt, and tie ensemble, looking very Regis Philbin. He then begins delivering his hokey spiel as if taking a breath might kill him. Soon after it’s established by unseen announcer Chip Devlin that there are “no rules at all” in this game, Big Bob allows his superficial emcee smile to harden, but he continues talking at a pace that would put Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to shame and make Lucky in Waiting for Godot eat his heart out.

Before long, leather-faced hostess Vera (James Cleveland, who also voices Chip) is banging Dan over the head for not answering questions that he doesn’t understand, while Maura attempts to stand by — or crouch by — her man. As things worsen, Maura cries to the rampaging Big Bob, “Just tell me what you want. I’ll do whatever…anything you want.” Big Bob replies, “Yes. I think we’ve established that,” to underline dramatist Hopkins’s stale notion that Americans are docile as sheep and only interested in putting a new refrigerator in their gleaming kitchen and a new automobile in their sleek driveway.

If screwmachine/eyecandy holds any interest at all, it’s as a production directed by John Clancy. Already this season, the industrious fellow has helmed both Brian Parks’s Goner and his own Fatboy (which also featured Walsh). Clancy is committed to the belief that searing satire is the way to get his message across. He’s interested in crude comedy and has no time for niceties but, usually, he’s also devoted to wit and word-play, which are lacking here.

Perhaps not by coincidence, the far superior Fatboy contained a sequence that reappears here: The director attempts to goad audience members into some sort of verbal response when the irritating Big Bob tries to get Maura to admit that consumer goods are not the be-all-and-end-all of contemporary existence. If Clancy’s intention is to make patrons fess up to being fatally complacent, he’s using the wrong dramaturgical tactics. Ticket buyers don’t fall for them; instead, they become resentful and shut off their thoughts and emotions.

Throughout the frantic proceedings, Calvitto speaks so speedily that he could be brought up on steroid charges. He’s the Barry Bonds of stage chat, and for that he deserves credit. But he, Coelius, and Walsh fail to round out their stock characters. In the last few minutes of the screwmachine/eyecandy, the latter pair are flailing around on the floor in the funny money that’s strewn around. Their ignominy mustn’t be held against them; they’re caught in a show that’s worth no more of a theatergoer’s time than it would take the fast-talking Calvitto to recite the title.