Theatre in Review: KENREX (Lucille Lortel Theatre)KENREX is a weird hybrid, a British take on a venerable American true crime saga, the kind of thing that used to rouse Nancy Grace's carnivorous instincts. Go online to find Morley Safer's 60 Minutes report from 1981; it's a bizarre case of vigilante justice in the heartland, a tale of flat plains, flat accents, and flat-out lies, which makes In Cold Blood look like a college prank. Why Truman Capote never got his hands on it, I'll never know. The title refers to Ken Rex McElroy, a middle-aged hellion with a steel plate in his head and rage in his heart, who terrorizes the town of Skidmore, Missouri. Thanks to a slick lawyer and townspeople well-drilled in fear and intimidation, Ken Rex has gotten off from twenty-one assorted criminal charges, including "bar fights, petty theft, arson, assault." He shoots a local farmer twice in the chest and still managed an acquittal. With his malicious teen bride, Trena, at his side -- the script implies they got married so she couldn't testify against him in a statutory rape case -- he commits additional acts of arson, intimidation, and assault, until the night when, surrounded by his fellow citizens, he is shot to death. Who pulled the trigger(s)? Hard to say; everyone involved seems to have been looking elsewhere when murder was committed. Except for Trena, all eyes remain dry. It's all true, and the case remains unsolved to this day. A strange tale gets an even stranger presentation: Actor/playwright Jack Holden, teaming up with co-author/director Ed Stambollouian, has conceived KENREX as a marathon, highly theatricalized solo piece, with composer John Patrick Elliott sharing the stage with Holden, providing a steady stream of blues and rock music. Pale, ginger-haired, baby-faced, technically skilled Holden is a suitable framework on which to hang a gallery of taciturn Midwesterners, and, unlike many of his British colleagues, he knows his way around American accents; he is also good at giving life to most of the script's thirty-five -- count 'em, thirty-five -- characters. To do so, Holden bounces around Anisha Fields's starkly designed two-level set like a human pinball, slipping behind a set of Plexiglas drum shields to re-enact a desperate call to 911; arranging a series of floor mics in a circle to suggest a gaggle of outraged citizens; and dealing out new personas like cards from a deck. Much of the time, he is David Baird, the prosecuting attorney, who took the job on the wildly mistaken notion that "nothing ever happens in Skidmore." He is the play's quasi-narrator, often in tense dialogue with Parker, an FBI agent investigating the case, represented by a female voice on a reel-to-reel tape. But he also weighs in as Ken Rex, speaking in a mad-dog undertone of menace; Trena, her aggrieved whine like a drill aimed at one's forehead; McFadin, the slick, smiling defense lawyer, giggling at yet again getting away with murder; and Ida, the tavern keeper, a "Woodstock original" and Ken Rex's only plausible friend. If you like crime, it's a diverting story; handled with more insight, it might raise troubling questions about how our justice system does or doesn't work. Here, it is reduced to an actor's tour de force; Holden and his exertions become the show. Or, I should say, the show-off: The distractions are many, including the actor's massive expenditure of energy; Elliott's underscoring, which sometimes fights the text, and Joshua Pharo's lighting cues, which often seem to be gearing up for an eleven o'clock number that never arrives. (In contrast, Pharo's projections are sparingly used and relatively understated.) A story that would benefit from being told in a whisper -- the melodramatic facts are gripping enough -- is awkwardly imagined as an extravaganza. It never gives us a moment to breathe, let alone care about the people of Skidmore. The action picks up in the second act, when a courtroom skirmish over bail raises the very real possibility of Ken Rex in jail for the first time, a prospect that sends him on a rampage. This leads to the surprisingly effective (and quiet) climax. All along, sound designer Giles Thomas has provided a parade of deft, understated sound cues that up the texture of life in Skidmore. (More than once, I thought KENREX would work best as a radio play.) For once, the action slips into a hush, and Thomas skillfully uses spatialization techniques to surround the audience with Ken Rex's past victims, putting us in the center of the violent resolution. It's one of the most inventive sound designs I've experienced all season. Most of the time, however, KENREX is overwhelmed by an excess of everything; instead of intriguing, it is exhausting, a series of bravura choices in search of a rationale. Everyone involved in the production is talented, but they need to do less. --David Barbour 
|
