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Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Pacific Resident Theatre
Through September 28
Fried Meat Ridge Rd. is a pretty wacky name for a street, but actually it’s a real thoroughfare that runs just outside Keyser, West Virginia, where playwright Keith Stevenson is from. (The place comes up on Trulia with photographs of a manicured landscape, and a listing of over a million bucks.)
Stevenson’s play, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos, is set in a far less affluent neighborhood, in a rundown motel room (scenic designer Norman Scott’s effective rendering). The room is inhabited by a good-natured hillbilly JD (Stevenson), who pays no rent there but has somehow gotten it into his head that he needs a roommate. Mitchell (Neil McGowan), a pale, nervous New Englander out of work and pretty much out of options, responds to his ad.
Although desperate for a place to live, Mitchell is not so desperate that he’s anxious to share this cluttered trash-strewn space with a bearded stranger whose choice of beverage is limited to vodka and Mountain Dew. He grows even more apprehensive after he meets some of JD’s neighbors: Marlene (Kendrah McKay), a frenzied meth addict, weeping hysterically over her boyfriend’s betrayal; said boyfriend, Tommy (Alex Fernandez), a moocher and petty thief; and Flip, the motel owner (Michael Prichard), an equal opportunity bigot who seemingly never met a group he couldn’t hate.
This screwball assortment coalesces into an affable comedy that you want to like more than you’re able to. A self-conscious “look-how-wacky-we are” sense to the proceedings, an obviousness to the play’s contrivances keeps one at a remove. Some of the characters, Marlene especially, seem like one of many types imported from a Del Shores or Tracy Letts play. Others, like the racist, homophobic Flip, are too simplistically drawn. Part of the problem lies in the performance, but there’s no getting around the unsubtle dialogue.
What the production does have is McGowan, who does a super job playing straight man to all the cranks while garnering sympathy as a down-on-his-luck everyman grappling with adverse circumstances. It’s a highly skilled performance that keeps one engaged and anchors the production. And Stevenson’s JD, though he lacks complexity, is a genial presence whose kindliness gives the story some raison-d-etre.
Pacific Resident Theatre, 701 Venice Blvd., Venice; Sun. 3 p.m.; through Sept. 28. (310) 822-8392, PacificResidentTheatre.com
