AUDACITY: Two Rooms & a Big Place

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Two Rooms & A Big Place

PRESS

Review: Rooms' temperature rises in 'Big Place'

01/18/2002

By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

Conflict. Conflict. Conflict. That's what teachers tell budding playwrights to build their plots around. The three writers whose one-acts make up "Two Rooms & a Big Place" have obviously taken the advice.

In Jason Stuart's Elephant Room, a man confronts the friend he believes is having an affair with his wife. In Steve Spehar's The Frontier, the last two gunfighters in the world shoot it out. In Michael Allegra's Coffee Room, a sadistic boss announces to his four employees he's going to fire one by the end of the day - and the maneuvering begins.

Audacity Productions opened the trio Thursday at the Bath House Cultural Center - in a small room behind the art gallery, not in the theater space. The audience got shooed out during the intermissions so that the performing area could be rearranged for each play.

Mr. Stuart, the only local of the three playwrights, has won some prizes for his work. Elephant Room, though, is the slightest piece on the program. Accuser and accused interrupt each other to analyze and criticize each other's language and strategies. A cabaret singer somehow gets involved in their imbroglio. You might call the script postmodern.

The Frontier doesn't take itself too seriously, either. Still, it's a lot of fun and it has some resonance. Brendan Ahern adopts a wonderfully silly Western drawl in which to deliver his macho lines. Jason Magee counters with a tip of his cowboy hat and a smirk. The ending becomes a bit predictable, but a critic mustn't give away whether the audience ever learns why the two actors are dressed in nothing except elaborate diapers and cowboy boots.

Coffee Room is a more substantial piece of writing. The four workers - book editors, actually - have diverging and believable personalities. The actors (Beauen Bogner, Mr. Magee, Valerie Hauss-Smith and Brad McEntire) achieve a nicely detailed naturalistic style with the help of director Vikas Adam. At first it seems as though Mr. Adam and the actor who plays the boss, Tim Shane, have made the role too melodramatically villainous. But the script does support the interpretation.

Samantha Tella directed Elephant Room, Mr. McEntire The Frontier.

"Two Rooms & a Big Place," presented by Audacity Productions at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Drive at Northcliff, Tuesdays through Saturdays through Jan. 26. Tickets $12. Call 214-731-8650, or go to www.audacityproductions.org.