by
Diane
Windeler
Special to the Express-News
Manley
Carstairs' had lived with his domineering mother virtually all his
life — some 40 years — and after she finally died, Manley
determined to hire a fetching young thing "to fetch" for
him. What he ended up with was a housekeeper so frumpy, inept and
unkempt that she made the old Carol Burnett character look like a
pinup girl.
Thus
begins James Prideaux's wild and weird "The Housekeeper,"
a black comedy now playing at the Steven Stoli
Playhouse. Its
plotline is so convoluted and preposterous that the only solution
was to treat it as a living cartoon, a vehicle for some of the most
outrageous mugging and posing seen hereabouts within recent memory.
The
title role was a given for multitalented Stoli stalwart Sandy Schwartz
, and director Kathleen Lovejoy found the perfect
mobile-faced foil in Jack Strawn. As the initial setup shatters, the
two go at each other, hammer and tong, in a sort of "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" meets "Spy vs. Spy," with
a little "Sleuth" thrown in.
We
soon learn that housekeeper Annie is actually a sticky-fingered bag
lady whose résumé was a sham. She's a lousy cook and even worse as
a domestic. Manley turns out to be an agoraphobic writer whose
pomposity is as over-the-top as his appalling prose-poetry. Moreover, he reveals that, to keep him tethered to her apron
strings, his mother funded the publication of his books.
In
short, both characters are dysfunctional and near the boiling point
with sexual repression. Sounds bizarre, and it is, but the script
abounds with laugh-out-loud lines and improbable twists, many
delivered directly to the audience. This nutty twosome actually
makes it all work, assuming the audience is willing to go with the
flow.
As
a backdrop to the madness, Lovejoy and her team came up with an
attractive, cleverly detailed set depicting a slightly seedy but
elegant old mansion.
Occasional
lags in pacing will pick up with additional performances.
"The Housekeeper"
can be seen at 8 p.m. Fridays, 7:30 p.m. Saturdays and 2:30 p.m.
Sundays through Sept. 25 at the Steven Stoli Playhouse, 11838
Wurzbach at Lockhill Selma roads. Tickets cost $12-$18.50. Call
(210) 408-0116 for reservations. |