July 15-21, 2004

theater

Wait!

by David Anthony Fox

There are a number of pleasures along the road of Julie Jensen's Wait!. As a playwright, Jensen has a cheerfully idiosyncratic voice, and there are two or three terrific scenes. Best of all, Wait! gives the lovely actress (and Eternal Spiral Project's co-artistic director) Jessica Graham her best opportunity yet to shine. She plays — if you can imagine this — a kind of female equivalent of the lanky, lovesick boys that were a specialty of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, and Graham is funny, touching and altogether adorable.

In the aggregate, though, Wait! is a bit of a mess.

The story follows Wendy (Graham), a young, blue-collar Southern woman pulled in several directions. Her beer-guzzling father wants her in beauty school, but truck-driving is Wendy's natural preference. (Yes, that means what you think it does.) The two arrive at a compromise that has Wendy joining the local community theater, where she meets a host of oddballs, including Lu, the gayest director since Roger DeBris, and Vixen, a dumb but dewy ingenue. Wendy falls head-over-heels for Vixen.

In the father-daughter interactions (especially those in Act II), Jensen employs a sweet-sad, whimsical tone that resembles the fiction of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote — and the writing is at its best. (Bob Weick, who plays the dad, is good here too.)

Much of the rest of Wait!, though, is a zany comedy. When a play includes characters called "Floating Piñata Head" and "Vixen O My Vixen" (the latter has christened herself after a Whitman poem I doubt she would actually know), the tone is going to be dangerously broad.

It's in that farcical style that, to me at least, Wait! stumbles. Director Carole Laratonda and her cast make every effort — indeed Susan Moses, playing several roles, goes bravely at her scenes with all guns blazing — but the humor stubbornly refuses to ignite. (It works best in a couple of scenes involving a strange foreign couple who smother Wendy with food, but these segments have little to do with the rest of the play.)

So it's a mixed bag, and your take on it may depend on both your taste in comedy and your affection for the performers. For myself, I'd say the play is problematic but ultimately endearing. And I can report in confidence that Graham's performance is absolutely worth the Wait!.

Wait! Through July 25, Theatre Catalyst's Eternal Spiral Project, 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330