Witty double feature looks inward

Narration is the silent workhorse of storytelling. Although it usually goes unnoticed, it is both the mediator and most important character in a story. “Authorial Intent”

Directed by Allison Coldeway

and “The Well of Horniness”

Directed by Joanna Getting and Jennica Tamler

Feb. 2-6 and 11-13

Studio Theatre

Tickets $8 (students) and $12 (adults)

play.pitt.edu/

412-624-PLAY (7529)

Grade: A-

Narration is the silent workhorse of storytelling. Although it usually goes unnoticed, it is both the mediator and most important character in a story. Narration controls how we receive the sequence of the story, what information is available to us and how we will perceive characters and events. While narration is usually content with its humble background role, sometimes it takes on too much flair to be ignored. That is the case in both plays currently being offered as a two-fer by Pitt Repertory Theatre. “Authorial Intent” and “The Well of Horniness” are plays that derive their value not from their content but from the forms in which they reach us.

“Authorial Intent” by Itamar Moses — a thoughtful, three-scene play only employing two characters — is a tightly written success. Each scene parallels the others, telling the same story in a unique way. Every scene begins, as so many plays do, with the female character at an island countertop doing her makeup. The play makes explicit use of theater cliches as a way of exposing the narrative process. Why have the female character doing her makeup? To keep her still so that the male character can rush around the room unimpeded, of course.

The second scene makes the narrative strategy of the play in the first scene explicit. It is the same scene, only now the actors are supposed to mechanically relay the objectives, tactics and overarching “authorial intent” of director Allie Coldewey. The scene is absurdly surreal, as the actors must alternate from robotic expositions of the narrative strategy to emotional utterances of their most important lines.

The third scene depicts the actors disassembling after their final performance. The female introduces the scene in exactly the same position. As a ritual, she likes to remove her makeup onstage. It is her way of cutting ties with her characters. Then the male actor enters in his post-production attire and asks her out. This development opens up ample opportunities for references to the interior play and to the conventions of theater. By the end of the scene, he repeats the same line to her with which his character had closed during the play.

It is very difficult for an actor in a play to play an actor in a play, particularly if the character is inherently flawed, because there are so many levels of meaning that the primary actor must account for. But Max Reusing and Nina Starner do it proficiently. When playing actors in a play, they overact in the stereotypical, overwrought manner that many second-rate theater actors do. But as actors interacting after a play, they tone down those affectations and let their actions become genuine. This assures the audience of the precision with which they executed the first scene; the overacting had been deliberate.

“The Well of Horniness,” by Holly Hughes, has a less overt but equally prominent narrative structure. The play is about a noir radio show produced for lesbians by lesbians, who share seedy fictional anecdotes about women who succumb to the “well of horniness.”

The audience receives a mixture of behind-the-scenes access to the radio show, combined with moments in which the characters are acting the story out. The show also contains an authoritative narrator, speaking with a certain level of sarcastic curiosity and empathy. Sometimes it becomes clear that the narrator is not only talking to the audience of the radio show, but to the audience of the play as well. This allows the writer and director to ridicule certain theatrical and radio conventions while ironically making use of them. We even get to watch the characters make sound effects in the background and one character try to sell carpets during regularly scheduled commercial breaks.

The play, directed by Joanna Getting and Jennica Tamler, is dripping wet with slapstick sexual humor. Since there are only six actresses aside from the narrator, they each play a few roles at once, modifying their costumes only slightly to shift from one to the other.

The women also play the men in the show. This makes for some very funny stereotyping, as in one scene where two of the “men” are watching sports together. The scene opens with actresses Rachel Brookstein and Casey Lazor emitting alternating burps. After each burp, the perpetrator puts on her very best stink face. When one burp makes Lazor particularly uncomfortable, she is told just to “let it out.” The situation presents a hilarious caricature. Watching the over-the-top humor that comprises theater, I began to wonder whether Saturday Night Live is funnier to a live audience. It probably is.