Spider Bites
Theatre of NOTE
TICKETHOLDERS
O, what a juicy treat for the senses: the scattered ramblings of that seriously demented LA-based playwright-poet Jacqueline Wright—who has a “spider in a glass and an egg up her ass,” an honor here transferred to one of her colorfully offbeat characters—collected together and unswervingly performed under the fittingly ominous blanket title Spider Bites.
Now premiering at that relentlessly courageous tiny Hollywood storefront affectionately known to all fans of counterculture theatrics as Theatre of NOTE, Spider Bites pounces on its eagerly willing prey in 11 short but unrelated scenes which, under Dan Bonnell’s superbly inspired direction, are tied together as effortlessly—and creatively—as any thread of troubling dreams might be.
As with her disturbingly brilliant play Eat Me, which debuted to considerable and most deserved kudos at NOTE in 2004, Wright’s Bites are at once intricately nuanced and boldly horrific, her language both jarringly profane and yet delicately gossamer in its evocative poetics. “Jesus said he could not save me,” a character tells us, “and to try back during normal business hours.” Neither Williams nor Spillane could be more evocative in the vividly haunting images of everyday life, with all its inequities and its disappointments, Wright so effectively conjures.
Existing in Wright’s frequently grimy and often bizarrely hilarious world, a depressed insurance adjustor (Scott McKinley) wonders in his Motel 6 mirror if Indians had ex-wives as he readies for an evening off on a surely futile new hunt, musing that he must “get into the shower and wash out that gray and romance some local girl in thinking that I’m Elvis.”
A little girl (the mesmeric and always fearless Kirsten Vangsness) tries to convince her mother (Lauren Letherer) that it was the family dog who scribbled the crayon animals on the walls, a fact that would be substantiated by the drawings themselves (McKinley, Mandi Moss, and Dave Wilcox standing by with beneficent smiles in cartoon character costuming) if Mom would stop beating the innocent pup and open her eyes to their patient presence in the room.
And in Beautiful, a frail ex-flower child (Lynn Odell) tries to explain to her friend (Moss) why she is preparing to climb up the hill behind her nondescript suburban home to die, but only after passing her lilac painted walking stick on to her successor.
There is simply magnificent work created here by this dedicated ensemble of players, easily establishing the inherent “sadness of 4:28am,” the time when, I suspect, Wright sets down her most prolific ruminations. Still, the grandest honors must go to Bonnell and his co-conspirator, set designer Teresa Shea, who together have mastered an unstoppable vision of how to take this unearthly and über-talented wordsmith’s Kerouac-strewn thoughts off the page and turn them into a fascinating, breathtaking piece of theatrical invention that seems to weave from Beckett to Shepard to Lett, all of it appearing to be inspired by a austerely financed roadshow company from Cirque du Soleil.
There’s a squeaky trapdoor leading down stone stairs to the performing space’s actual cellar, an onstage shallow pool able to be walked into, shoes and all, despite the clearly viewable underwater lighting (so enhancing the most indelible piece of the evening, George and Carrie, with McKinley and Odell searingly heartbreaking as two lonely office coworkers awkwardly bonding in his lonely cubicle); an oversized Dali-inspired harp mounted on the back wall that morphs into a bed before depositing its troubled occupant (Letherer) into what is presumably the bathtub where she’s to bleed out her last thoughts; and a riveting monologue from Vangsness dubbed simply Remember Him, with her ultra-white face merely a disembodied head protruding from a curtain while a spotlight is reflected on it from the bottom of a black tray as she rages on about the guy who took her love and “shoveled it in with a short stack of jokers.”
If you’re looking for a coherent little story to follow and see resolve to the end, try another venue. Although there are ongoing topics Wright absurdly, often shockingly explores concerning the nature of lies and punishment in Spider Bites (a world where, as she puts it, “beauty looks like death and death looks like beauty”), there’s unapologetically no real connecting throughline here except perhaps to further solidify the notion that Jacqueline Wright should possibly be committed.
As long as her attendants keep her hands free of the restraints and are faithful in supplying the means for her to continue to chronicle her particularly astute and poetic predicament with the unending puzzlements of our human condition, maybe it would be best to just make her as comfortable as possible.
Spider Bites plays through Oct. 4 at Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd, Hollywood, CA; for tickets, call 323.856.8611. For more information, visit www.theatreofnote.com
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