| ABDUCTING DIANA,
TinFish Theatre. The heroine of Dario Fo's screwball satire
was originally a banker, but Stephen Stenning's 1986 adaptation made her
into a media mogul, a conglomerista who proves more cruel, conniving, and
capitalistic than her bumbling kidnappers. Her mother's no wuss either.
No playwright can go wrong knocking the rich and pwerful, and action-movie cliches are a likewise reliable target. But a story that involves Fo's trademark corrupt priests, the plucky prisoner improvising a weapon from a hair dryer, and crooks disguised in Halloween masks depicting Clinton, Bush, Newt, and Monica could easily have descended into juvenile chaos. This TinFish show is saved from such a fate |
by director Kerstin Broockmann,
who sets a brisk pace, and a tightly focused cast who never allow the energy
to flag or the plot complications to skid out of control. Karen Foley
and Maggie Speer are particularly fine as the ruthless mother-daughter
duo, though Ed Dzialo deserves combat pay for his portrayal of a hapless
hoodlum who's beaten shckled, electrocuted, torched, slathered with Marshmellow
Fluff, and locked into a refrigerator by his resourceful captive.
Agile ensemble playing, enhanced by Lindsay Jone's giddy score and R &
D Choreography's "violence design", keeps the farcical antics crisp and
coherent tight up to the play's astonishingly logical conclusion
- Mary Shen Barnidge |
|