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The Pitchfork Disney
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Coeurage Theatre Company at Lyric-Hyperion Theatre & Cafe
Through March 6
Philip Ridley, whether as playwright (The Fastest Clock in the Universe, Mercury Fur, Tender Napalm) or filmmaker (The Mysterious Skin, Heartless), remains ever distinctively individual, and this revival of his first play, 1991’s The Pitchfork Disney, produced locally in 2006 by Company of Angels (and subsequently in 2011 at Next Stage), affords a revealing opportunity to see how his work holds up long after its initial shocks ought to have worn off.
For Ridley is a determined provocateur: a post-punk Beckett who revels in rubbing audience faces, oft-times literally, in disgust. Even more discomfiting, he presents extremes of aberrant psychology in a manner that forces us to confront elements within ourselves that are capable of identifying with it. He creates claustrophobic, despairing, filthy scenarios that deliberately eschew the relatively epicene elegance of the earlier Absurdists, his Surrealism completely untethered from that movement’s original purpose of liberation. In Ridley, we only sink deeper into the mire of our own fixations.
On the other hand, we are all culturally hardened cases at this point of social development, and it’s not easy to animate unmediated reactions of revulsion anymore: we’ve become too accustomed to laughing at grossness and chuckling, however uncomfortably, at excess. The vocabulary of horror today rarely restrains itself from delight in being over-the-top, a prime example being Stuart Gordon’s deliciously modulated Taste from last year.
Ridley is more insidiously disquieting and can’t be dismissed with knowing winks that let us feel in on the joke. The Pitchfork Disney creates with unremitting earnestness its hermetic world of 28 year old twins, Presley Stray (Joseph V. Calarco) and Haley Stray (Nicole Monet), mired in arrested development in their cramped apartment littered with discarded chocolate wrappers, having regressed since the long-ago disappearance of their parents into an infantile sibling symbiosis of tit-for-tat codependence. They stray from the womb-like sanctuary only to forage for candy and medicine to allay their anxieties and enable them to sleep in shifts.
Spying out the tiny window (impishly designed by Amanda Stuart), Presley sees a sick man abandoned in the street, and while Haley sleeps, contrives to bring him up to the apartment. Cosmo Disney (Jeremy Lelliott) makes a menacingly preening Pinteresque interloper, taunting and manipulating Presley into increasingly outlandish acts, not least the distressing gesture of eating a live cockroach. (Earlier, Presley shared a private confession with Haley that as a child, he had panfried his pet garden snake.) Cosmo, who pukes on the carpet upon entering and truculently demands that Presley clean it up, claims to be waiting for his associate (Cosmo doesn’t have friends, and detests being touched), Pitchfork Cavalier (Adam Kern), who sounds just like a fugitive straight from the twins’ tortured nightmares.
Ridley starting out writing children’s books, I would imagine with consummate devilry. Fractured fairy tales laced with unresolved terrors course through the dramaturgy, mixing well with the high culture references, such as Pitchfork’s appearance at the front door, so baldly reminiscent of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, were he played by pro wrestler doing a Hannibal Lecter impression.
The roles are all so compelling that actors are really afforded considerable leeway to strut their wares, and the primary trio, Artistic and Managing Directors of Coeurage (portraying the Stray twins) who each rarely appear onstage, yet are here all together for the first time, exhibit both the swagger and sensitivity to be simultaneously flamboyant and interior. Lelliott in particular makes delicious work of the insolently insinuating Cosmo, a character who makes no sense at all, yet is utterly believable.
The play does not sustain itself successfully throughout. While many of us might feel the urge to share our dreams in detail, there is limited tolerance for it on the part of the listeners. The same holds here, where extended monologues about tormented nocturnal fantasies are lyrically written and skillfully played, but extend so long that the accumulated tensions deflate and our attention almost insists on wandering.
Still, it is faintly amazing that a period piece meant to appall can retain so much metaphoric and transgressive power after 25 years, a rare promising first play that remains worthwhile when no longer new.
It should be mentioned that as a socially committed company, Coeurage since its inception has maintained a Pay What You Want policy, courageously keeping the box office open during intermissions and after a performance just in case someone finds the show worth more than they remitted in advance. It’s a strong gesture toward a theater open to all.
Playwright: Philip Ridley
Directed by Rebecca Eisenberg
Cast: Joseph V. Calarco, Nicole Monet, Jeremy Lelliott, Adam Kern.
Scenic Designer: Amanda Stuart. Lighting Designer: Michael Kozachenko. Sound Designer: Jenna Riley. Costume Designer: Marcy Hiratzka.
Coeurage Theatre Company at Lyric-Hyperion Theatre & Café, 2106 Hyperion Ave, Silver Lake; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through March 6. (323) 944-2165, https://www.coeurage.org/tickets
