Theatre in Review: Dot (Vineyard Theatre)

	Marjorie Johnson, Finnerty Stevens. Photo: Carol Rosegg

In Dot, playwright Colman Domingo applies such extremes of comedy and tears to his material that, combined with his passion to educate the public on a certain medical condition, it ends up coming across rather like one of those very special episodes of a popular network situation comedy. (Because some of the characters are blacks with flamboyant personalities, it has the unmistakable air of a Norman Lear series of the late '70s or early '80s.) Still, this often-scattershot effort hits its targets a fair amount of the time. If you don't mind the distracting sound of a playwright recklessly switching gears, you're likely to find Dot to be amusing, moving, and grating in equal measure.

The title character, also known as Dotty, is a 63-year-old Philadelphia matriarch -- although, as costumed by Kara Harmon and played by Marjorie Johnson, she seems a good ten years older. A widow, she exists in a state of perpetual skirmish with her tart-tongued and highly controlling daughter, Shelly. As Shelly stalks about the kitchen, ordering her mother around, Dot fights back with wisecracks. "I was wondering what was going on with your hair. You look like a mean pineapple," Dotty says, surveying her daughter's unfinished blonde coiffure. Shelly is rapidly unraveling under the strain of dealing with her mother, raising a son, and holding on to her job as a public defender -- which explains why she is helping herself to watermelon vodkas at nine in the morning. For a good portion of the rollicking first scene of Dot, Dotty gleefully has the upper hand and her daughter becomes increasingly frazzled. Then, from one second to the next, Dotty changes -- she seems not to recognize a visitor; opening the cupboard in search of salt, she returns with a package of Oreos. And, we learn, Dotty was stopped by the police for driving 95 miles an hour with no clear destination. Shelly adds that this last incident happened on Wissahickon Drive, "right where Teddy Pendergrass crashed his car with that transsexual." This combination of hard truths with hard-edged gagging -- dragging up a decades-old scandal about a late, great pop singer -- gives you a pretty good idea of Dot's modus operandi.

Clearly, Dotty can't be left alone, and Shelly is in no position to be her full-time caretaker. Christmas is only a couple of days away, and the rest of the family is en route to Dotty's house for the holidays, so Shelly intends to enlist her siblings in a plan to get her installed in an assisted living facility. This may not be a realistic goal: Donnie, the golden boy, is struggling with his marriage to Adam, and Averie, the officially designated wild child, is a former YouTube sensation now on the skids, working checkout at PriceRite and living in Shelly's basement; both are too wrapped up in their own problems to focus on the disaster unfolding in their childhood home.

In its best moments, Dot has a lively magpie quality that mixes acutely rendered observations about one family's eccentricities with a clear-eyed view of the terrible losses old age can bring. "Why are all hairdressers named Andre?" wonders Dot, taking aim at the man responsible for Shelly's semi-blonde look. Listening to Averie wax enthusiastic, and at great length, about the importance of pork chitterlings to the family's heritage, a fed-up Shelly snaps, "Where do you get this very odd modern-day slave narrative from?" When it is mentioned that Averie has managed to extend her career with work in TV commercials, Shelly replies, acidly, "I don't consider a 1-800-BAD-CREDIT or a 555-WE-DO-HAIR legitimate commercials." There's a touching sequence in which Dotty, having one of her episodes, dances with Adam, under the delusion that he is her late husband. And yet, only a few minutes earlier, she is lucid enough to observe of her children, "They only see me as a mother and not a woman."

The script also suffers from some patchy sequences in which the promised alloy of laughter and sadness comes totally unstuck. Averie is a screeching stereotype of ghetto attitude -- totally assumed, since she was raised in a middle-class home with professionals for parents -- that only a black writer would dare create. ("That tree is huge! Hey Adam! We gonna decorate the f-k out of it! Ooh Mommy, I'm sorry I said f-k! Come on y'all, we gonna have a merry f-king Christmas!" It's at moments like these that Dot seems to stray into Jeffersons territory.) The scenes of Donnie and Adam hashing out their relationship -- Adam watches Donnie's weight like a hawk; Donnie fears Adam is clinging to his youth instead of focusing on having kids -- seem to exist mostly to prove that gay couples can be as banal as their straight counterparts. The sequence in which Donnie, wearing latex gloves, vision-fraying goggles, and headphones, with pebble in his shoes, wanders the house in an effort to understand what it is like to be old, plays like a television PSA, a pause for a serious audience lecture. And at least one character, Jackie -- the neighborhood's token Jewish girl, who has long carried a torch for Donnie and who is now pregnant by a married man -- seems to have wandered in from an earlier draft, with little or nothing to do here. She does provide the rationale for one priceless gag: Jackie has given the entire family a wide berth since the mortifying moment she discovered Donnie and Adam making out on the living room couch. Domingo engineers a situation where history repeats itself, leading to the maximum of embarrassment for everyone.

Another director might have done more to paper over Dot's disjointed nature, but Susan Stroman, retaining some of the hard-sell techniques she applies in musical theatre, directs in such slam-bang sitcom fashion that you can almost hear the laugh track. Still, Johnson deftly captures the way Dotty goes in and out mentally, slaying with a gag line one moment and looking totally confused the next: Stephen Conrad Moore and Colin Hanlon go a long way toward making Donnie and Adam worth caring about; and, as Shelly, Sharon Washington remains sympathetic even in mid-tirade. Finnerty Steeves does her best with the superfluous role of Jackie; Libya V. Pugh does her best strutting and posing as Averie, and Michael Rosen is sweet as the young Kazakh man who works as Dotty's caregiver.

The production has plenty of style, thanks to Allen Moyer's scenery, which includes a show curtain offering a pointillist view of a residential Philadelphia street, Dotty's canary yellow kitchen, and the living room, which, with its grand piano and old-fashioned hi-fi, seems frozen in time. Ben Stanton's lighting is especially effective in adding to the melancholy mood of the later scenes. Harmon's costumes are generally fine, as are Dave Bova's hair and makeup, and Tom Morse's sound makes good use of a variety of selections, including Tony Bennett singing "My Favorite Things" and Judy Garland's cover of "Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe."

It's also true that, whatever his excesses, Domingo has such affection for his characters that when they gather around the Christmas tree, considerably sadder but wiser, it's easy to be moved by their determination to make the most of the holidays, no matter what. Domingo (A Boy and His Soul, Wild with Happy) remains a gifted writer who hasn't quite found his groove outside the solo show format. Like its title character, Dot suffers from a few too many mood swings. -- David Barbour