Burn After Reading

REVIEW: Brat Productions' Carrie

by David Anthony Fox

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Published: Oct 20, 2010

Camp is the soufflé of comedy. Not for all tastes (and certainly not hearty fare), it's specialized and delicate. When executed perfectly, the result is indescribably delicious. But unless everything comes together, it's likely to fall flat. And once fallen, it's pretty tough to puff it up again.

Carrie would seem to have almost everything going for it, starting with the source material. Stephen King's creepy saga of teenage girl outsider-ness and telekinetic revenge offers a veritable kitchen sink of potential camp icons, from proms to menstruation to a life-size crucifix accessorizing our heroine's living room. Erik Jackson's script makes fine use of all this, and throws in some clever winks at Brian De Palma's celebrated movie version. In the title role, drag performer Erik Ransom does many funny things. (Ransom looks nothing like Sissy Spacek, but oddly he's a dead ringer for the film's secondary female lead, Amy Irving.) The supporting cast is lively and winning, with especially good work from Leah Walton as Margaret, Carrie's evangelical whack-job mom, and Bethany Ditnes as Chris, the cheerleader from hell.

Yet Carrie never quite achieves liftoff. The best stuff comes at the end, where the various catastrophes — all of which call for lavish special effects — are re-created on a shoestring budget with laugh-out-loud results. But though Brat Productions director Michael Alltop moves things along and engineers some nifty scene shifts, the show as a whole is (forgive me) slow to ignite, and goes on too long. And as strong as much of the acting is, camp requires a higher level of sustained energy and over-the-top delivery. Ultimately, I'm not sure Carrie itself is quite the right vehicle for this kind of parody — both the novel and the movie are a little too self-aware. But then, that's the ultimate irony of this most ironic form. Theater that is deliberately camp is never as effective as the camp latent in theater that was intended to be taken seriously.

Through Nov. 7, $23-$29, Underground Arts at the Wolf Building, 340 N. 12th St., 215-627-2577, bratproductions.org.

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