The Philadelphia Inquirer

Betty’s Summer Vacation at IRC: Outrageous mayhem, incorrect and hilarious

by Toby Zinman 

June 14, 2019

 

Sex! Violence! More sex! More violence! IRC’s hilarious production of Christopher Durang’s Betty’s Summer Vacation is a total hoot.

 

No doubt this wild show will offend or shock some audience members. No doubt others will try to chastise the show for insensitivity to the psychosexual moment. But anybody trying to hashtag IRC or Durang will be left standing on the dock with their mouths hanging open, having missed the boat. Tina Brock directs with gusto and glee.

 

Trying to summarize the plot is an exercise in absurdity, but that, of course, is what IRC is dedicated to. As the company, under Brock’s savvy artistic direction, has moved on from the European theater of the absurd (playwrights like Ionesco) to the American absurdists (playwrights like Durang), the direction of travel is away from the metaphorical and philosophical and toward the riotously outrageous. IRC’s last production, the very American Eccentricities of a Nightingale by Tennessee Williams, was a far more melancholy work than this current show, but it launched a similar attack on society’s mores and values. Ultimately that means us.

 

The “us” in Betty’s Summer Vacation is a group of three (Josh Hitchens, Carlos Forbes, and Kassy Brandford); we hear them before we see them, as their raucous laughter seems to come from the ceiling. Then they talk to the people onstage. Then they appear, looking like Creatures from the Black Lagoon, begging for another scene: “Entertain us.” They are the audience, the lappers-up of celebrity gossip, the droolers over bizarre rumors of perversions, the lovers of tabloid scandal sheets and trash-talk Court TV. “Us” have been schooled.

 

The plot defies summary, as mentioned, but here goes: Betty (Kirsten Quinn, excellent as the Voice of Reason) and her friend Trudy (Amanda Schoonover, terrific) have rented a beach house for a week, with the proviso that Trudy, a non-stop talker, will stop talking. Two other renters turn up: One is horny surfer dude Buck (Chris Fluck, whose riff on Oleanna has got to be seen): “Let’s just have sex.” “You’re just like my father.” And Keith (Anthony Crosby, wonderfully creepy), a serial killer: “Are you insane?” “Why does everybody ask me that?” Completing the party is the owner of the house, Mrs. Seizmagraff (Tina Brock, amazing, a human earthquake),Trudy’s mother. She invites a raincoat-wearing flasher derelict, one Mr. Vanislaw (William Rahill), to join them. Mayhem ensues as various penises and heads are chopped off.

 

The set, designed by Dirk Durossette, like the costumes, designed by Millie Hiibel, is both witty and ridiculous.

 

Theater

Betty’s Summer Vacation

Through June 30 at Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, Walnut Street Theatre, Independence Studio on 3, 825 Walnut St. Tickets: $15-$25. Information: 215-285-0472, IdiopathicRidiculopathyConsortium.org.

 

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reclining standards

armchair observations on theater, music, and more with your hosts, david fox and cameron kelsall

REVIEW: Betty’s Summer Vacation Is Not Your Usual Day at the Beach

by David Fox

June 14, 2019

 

When I was growing up, a weekly TV treat was The Wonderful World of Disney, which began with a song full of hope: “The world is a carousel of color / Wonderful, wonderful color.”

 

I thought of that show as I watched the opening of Betty’s Summer Vacation, where the title character and her friend Trudy plan their idyllic summer. The two are situated in a sea-side cottage practically vibrating with cheerful pastels (Dirk Durosette did the dynamite set), and they’re dressed for fun (great costumes by Millie Hiibel). What could possibly go wrong?

 

Well, quite a lot, really. First, the two don’t seem ideally paired. Betty (played by Kirsten Quinn) is gorgeous, but rather tightly-wound and controlling. Trudy (Amanda Schoonover) is adorable, but motor-mouthed and filter-less. Minutes later, a shy, clean-cut young man named Keith (Anthony Crosby, sweetly droll) arrives, clutching a hat box. Surely, it doesn’t contain a severed head… or does it?

 

Oh, and then there’s Trudy’s overbearing mother, Mrs. Seizmagraff (the great Tina Brock) who seems like a cross between Lucy Ricardo and Norma Desmond, and insists on reminding her daughter what a constant disappointment she is. And Buck (Chris Fluck), an aging surfer with (as he imagines it) an irresistible allure for the ladies—the kind of guy who thinks a good come-on line is: “I have pictures of my penis; do you want to see them?”

 

Still, Betty’s Summer Vacation is a comedy… isn’t it? For heaven’s sake, there’s even a laugh track: unseen voices cackle at every joke, often disconcerting Betty and company.

 

But this is a play by Christopher Durang, so of course the palette is loaded with darker shades. Those ghost-gigglers seem to chortle even harder at moments that are sad, painful, and scary. These include a fatal car accident, tales of incest-rape, and severed male genitalia that ends up in the freezer. Horrifyingly, one character might be a serial killer; worse, another actually likes David Mamet’s Oleanna.

 

There is a point to all this, but it doesn’t become clear till quite late in the action—and I shouldn’t give away too much. But consider that the presence of an increasingly demanding, unruly audience suggests the relationship of a playwright and his public is something close to mortal combat.

 

This is a lot of territory to cover in an 85-minute play, and it takes the audience on a wildly unpredictable ride. Fortunately, Brock (who also directs) is both a devotee of absurdism and a demonstrated master at negotiating tonally complex, off-center works—skills that are very welcome here.

 

For my taste, this production—by Brock’s estimable company, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium—is a bit more cranked-up than necessary. I’d like to see more of the collision between sitcom gloss and Hitchcockian gloom; the pace is sometimes so antic that the jokes (often barbed and multi-layered) don’t quite have time to land.

 

But much of the show is comic bliss, not least in the sheer exhilaration we feel watching three of Philadelphia’s best actresses giving gloriously unbuttoned, wickedly funny performances. Brock, Quinn, and Schoonover (the order here is strictly alphabetical) have rarely looked more joyful onstage. It’s as though they’re having the time of their lives up there—and how could the audience feel otherwise?

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Betty’s Summer Vacation plays through June 30th at the Walnut Street Theatre/Independence Studio on 3. For more information, visit the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium website.

 

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The Broad Street Review

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium presents Christopher Durang’s ‘Betty’s Summer Vacation’

The shores of absurdism

Cameron Kelsall

June 15, 2019 

 

What do you say about a play that features a woman brandishing a severed penis like a sword? A comedy in which the same woman, an incest survivor, criticizes a fast-moving potential suitor for behaving just like her father? A romp with a cast of characters that includes a serial killer, a serial flasher, and a serially neglectful mother so hungry for male attention that she ignored the aforementioned incest? If the play is Betty’s Summer Vacation by Christopher Durang, you say buy your tickets now.

 

Not for the faint of heart: the ensemble of IRC’s ‘Betty’s Summer Vacation.’ (Photo by Johanna Austin; AustinArt.org.)

As produced by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium (IRC) at Walnut Street Theatre’s Independence Studio on 3, Durang’s witty work elicits the kind of big belly laughs that leave audience members shaking in their seats. Yet the playwright laces his zany proceedings with zinfandel-dark satire that comments on the notions of sanity, celebrity, and the modern need to be constantly entertained. Pay close enough attention and you’ll be left shaken for an altogether different reason.

 

The interrupters

 

For one thing, yours won’t be the only laughter heard rippling through the room. As Betty (Kirsten Quinn) and Trudy (Amanda Schoonover) settle into their seaside share—rendered in kitschy pastels by set designer Dirk Durossette and lighted with appropriate abrasiveness by Joshua Schulman—the sounds of a sitcom studio audience seem to greet them. The disembodied voices move from boisterous yet hollow laughter to mischievous demands as the two women, and the kooky compatriots in their orbit, wonder where in the world they’re coming from.

 

It would be poor form to spoil the source of these constant interruptions, which are performed live by the delectable trio of Carlos Forbes, Kassy Bradford, and Josh Hitchens. Durang himself stops short of fully defining their origin: Are they aliens? Representations of the id? The remnants of a mind spiraling into a dissociative state? But he leaves little doubt about what they represent. Written in 1999, Betty’s Summer Vacation critiques the first wave of the 24-hour entertainment cycle, when Court TV and celebrity gossip launched a steady stream for a tuned-out, dead-eyed mass audience.

 

Screen time

 

Now that the majority of the population spends inordinate amounts of time staring at screens, the playwright’s recognition of mass susceptibility to anesthetizing infotainment feels prescient. As a satirist and an absurdist, he cleaves it to a sitcom from Hell—a heightened state that director Tina Brock realizes with pinpoint precision. And as a writer who takes up the topics of guilt, shame, and the darkness beneath manicured surfaces in his best work (like The Marriage of Bette and Boo or The Vietnamization of New Jersey), he recognizes no demarcating line between the lightest humor and the deepest human tragedy.

 

So be prepared for a parade of misery—in addition to the taboos already mentioned, you’ll be met with child abuse, rape, dismemberment, nymphomania, extreme violence, strained familial bonds, torture, and sociopathic behavior. Those with an unbearable aversion to these topics best stay home. Those who attend will laugh, and then probably hate themselves for it. Spoiler alert: That’s what the playwright intends.

 

Because that’s what we do, after all, when we revel in the easily accessible miseries and misdeeds of others. The references name-checked in the script are now somewhat dated, but the concepts they represent are not. And even when the characters discuss then-current affairs, we realize how close some of them still are. Andrew Cunanan’s real-time suicide? Hello, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. A withering comment about Michael Jackson’s junk? Might I suggest Leaving Neverland?

 

Entertaining us

 

Quinn excels in her straight-woman duties, which are not without a few tartly funny moments. Schoonover has always been a cutup, but she’s equally at home playing somber; those elements merge brilliantly in a performance that highlights the truly damaging after-effects of abuse. She can sell the most outrageous lines with absolute sincerity, a tiny glint in her eye the only thing betraying the ridiculousness of the moment. She pairs perfectly with Anthony Crosby’s deliciously deadpan killer Keith.

 

Brock herself takes on the role of Mrs. Siezmagraff, Trudy’s horrendous mother, and turns in a performance living up to the character’s name. The laughs she draws defy the Richter scale. Chris Fluck and Bill Rahill do fine work in smaller, less well-defined roles.

 

And those voices? They have one mandate: Entertain us. The explosive ending of Betty’s Summer Vacation leaves open the question of whether it’s better to succeed or fail at this demand.

 

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phindie.com

Independent coverage of Philadelphoia theater and arts

BETTY’S SUMMER VACATION (IRC): A terribly funny nightmare of a beach trip

By Margaret Darby 

June 16, 2019

 

For their June show, the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium decided to take on a grotesque play by Christopher Durang which Tina Brock directed. Brock herself has the prime comedic role of Mrs. Seizmagraff, the sex-crazed and wacky owner of the beach bungalow.

 

Mrs. Seizmagraff has rented out most of the rooms in her bungalow and we meet the occupants as they arrive. Betty (Kirsten Quinn) is the good girl, the one who ends up shopping and doing the dishes for everyone else. She arrives with Trudy (Amanda Schoonover), a friend who Betty had not realized is incapable of turning off the chatter.

 

Then Craig the serial killer arrives with a hatbox and shovel. The mood turns a bit dark, but the comedy is in the failure of anyone to recognize the danger. Voices begin to chime in from the ceiling with laughter and the occasional comment. What sort of bungalow is this?

 

Bucky (Chris Fluck) the funloving woman chaser brings his beer and announces his desire to have sex every second. And then comes Ms. Seizmagraff with all the flounce and drama Tina Brock can give her. Turns out her husband died and she lost the house so she will be staying at the beach, too.

 

After Betty shops for dinner and Ms. Seizmagraff takes in a homeless flasher from the beach, beautifully played by William Rahill, the fun begins. Serial killing, caterwauling from the ceiling, and general confusion ensues.

 

The set, designed by Dirk Durossette and built by Stage Rats, LLC, has five doors, each leading to a bedroom, a window shaped like a ship’s porthole, and a front door. The porthole and front door are translucent, and the lighting design by Joshua L. Schulman creates night and day through these portals.

The script is fairly raw and rape and decapitation are referred to but not seen. You do see, in Mrs. Seizmagraff’s most capable hands, a penis recently separated from its owner, but Mrs. S. puts it in the freezer right away, hoping it can be reattached.

 

This send-up of the television culture of a period which could be the 1970s (no cell phones, phones with dials, and relaxed sexual mores) are expressed strongly in language and action. The play is terribly funny, the acting quite good, but sex, violence, voyeurism, and self-gratification tell quite a judgmental tale about our culture—or lack thereof.

[Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium at Walnut Street Theatre Independence Studio 3, 825 Walnut Street] June 12-30, 2019; bettysummervacation.bpt.me