[NEohioPAL]'Roulette' worth gamble

[alanna at bnctheatre.com]

`Roulette' worth gamble

Bang and Clatter production is an up-close look at family with problems
By Elaine Guregian
Beacon Journal arts and culture critic

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But what if the visit happens only in your mind?

The fissures and roiling unhappiness that tear up one man's family life before his trip to Vegas shape Paul Weitz's play Roulette. The Bang and the Clatter Theatre Company opened the play over the weekend at Summit Artspace in Akron.

For this involving up-close encounter, the audience is practically seated at the kitchen table of a middle-class home. A full kitchen, complete with cabinets and appliances, not to mention a well-stocked selection of liquor, sets the backdrop.

Jon, the patriarch of the house, begins his day with a ritual that I won't reveal. Suffice it to say that the matter-of-factness with which Ralph Cooley performs it heightens the sense that all is definitely not right here.

Enid (Dede Klein, with a smile fit for a teeth whitener ad) is a mother who can sweep away the dust of the pills her daughter has been snorting and not even notice, in her zeal to tidy up, what she's cleaning, Jenny (the porcelain-skinned, red-haired Nicole Davies) is the Goth teenager whose tilted head and rolled eyes express her overarching disdain for her family.

Jenny's brother Jock (Ryan McMullen) starts out equally sullen, trading insults with Jenny as instinctively as birds calling to each other.

Then there are the neighbors, Steve and Virginia. Steve is a nerdy Everyman desperate with money problems. Tony Weaver, a BNC regular, rides this character triumphantly. Weaver made me laugh till I cried as he described the imagined ignominy of locking himself in a bathroom at a party.

Steve's wife, Virginia (Margaret Morris), hums the tune Mrs. Robinson as she mops up the milk she spills on a manufactured errand to Jon and Enid's house. Virginia is ridiculous in her inane conversational style and the way she look lustfully at Jock, who barely tolerates her. Touchingly, Jenny almost admits that she likes Virginia, despite her scorn, since Virginia shows the warmth that Enid entirely lacks.

The characters might sound like sorry excuses for human beings. In Friday night's nuanced performance, each one seemed flawed but sympathetic. Weitz may have started with cliches, but his zesty writing upends them, and these actors are gifted at making their problems seem not only universal but equal parts sad and funny. There are a lot of laughs in this domestic drama.

Director Sean McConaha has found a tone of bemused understatement that comes across as genuine. You can buy into it even if you're not living in a house where one spouse is having an affair, another is getting ready for a breakdown, and their children are selfish and disaffected. It's a bit of a cliche that adversity brings them together, but Weitz doesn't get there in any pat way. The playwright, and this talented company, wouldn't let that happen.
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Roulette runs April 20th - May 12th Thursdays through Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm at the Bang and the Clatter Theatre Company in Akron 
"Blackout Mondays" are 1/2 price tickets for people in the industry. Those performances are Monday, April 30th, and Monday, May 6th at 8pm.
For tickets or information, visit the website at www.bnctheatre.com
or call the box office at 330-606-5317
140 E. Market St.
Akron, OH 44308