Some of the best acting ever done
under Fringe Festival auspices -- perhaps the best ensemble emoting ever
-- is on display in Richard Thompson's Big Doolie, directed by Jenn Thompson
with a fire lit under her. Smart theatergoers will make a beeline to this
show before smart producers transfer it to a Broadway or Off-Broadway theater,
where the price of ducats will be much higher.
As you watch this lacerating send-up of big-time sports, sports agents,
sportscasters, and athletes, you start thinking that Edward James Hyland
as master dissembler Marty Futch is giving the show's best performance.
But no, you decide after a few heated speeches; it's Evan Thompson as the
veteran commentator Jack Mungo. Then you're convinced that the real standout
is Tim Artz as a football player who's far gone on steroids and other questionable
buck-me-ups. But wait! Your allegiance quickly shifts to David Christopher
Wells as a clawing apprentice agent -- and you're looking seriously at
Todd Gearhart as Les, a hard-nosed television producer who's wedded to
the company way. Also getting in their licks in smaller but juicy roles
are Adina Verson as secretary Rosie Lynch and Peterson Townsend as the
young, uncertain star prospect Reggie Banks.
All of this high-protein energy is in the service of a play about underhanded
behavior in the cut-throat world of professional sports. So what if it's
a metaphor of the sort you've seen before in works like David Mamet's Glengarry
Glen Ross? So what that the script could use some tightening? Thompson's
take on back-stabbing businessmen has the bile-heavy dialogue to sustain
this gander at a society (too much like ours!) that's based on top-level
mendacity. "You lie, you cheat -- I respect that," one character
says to another. Thompson doesn't respect it, which is why Big Doolie commands
respect.
Tagged “a savage new comedy,” this brilliantly executed production
definitely puts the emphasis on savage. No one ends up with what he really
wants or thinks he wants, or certainly the ability to enjoy what does come,
even after screwing many others over to try to get it. Marty Futch (played
endearingly by Edward James Hyland) is an old but wily, well-respected
sports agent who’s trying to get into the bigger time but is held
back both by the careless antics of longtime clients (“Beef,” a
football player broken in body and mind, and Jack Mungo, an aged sportscaster
fighting his drift into irrelevance and ridicule) and by one of his tactics
for the future – the hiring of an ambitious apprentice (“Bird
Dog,” played with serious sliminess by David Christopher Wells) to
help him scout young talent. Beef and Mungo are both cut or on the verge
of being cut from their respective positions, and they cling to Futch in
hopes that he can work miracles for them; Bird Dog, meanwhile, is mastering
the ropes of underhanded sports agent sleaze, but he’s not doing
so in the service of Futch’s office, and he’s also not learning
it from Futch. Marty Futch definitely isn’t some lone straight shooter
in a field of crooks, but he is haunted by the less-than-honest things
he does, and more than anything he truly cares about his clients; this
is wonderfully clear in Hyland’s performance, so even when Futch
is enabling Beef by giving him pills and loaning him cars, and even when
he’s going after another agent’s promised prospect, he’s
still an intensely sympathetic figure. Thompson keeps the momentum going
throughout the play with a series of ego clashes – a scene in which
Futch negotiates with a TV producer over a new contract for Mungo, with
Mungo in the room, stands out at the climax – but he doesn’t
drive it over the cliff of melodrama. Big Doolie is loud and darkly, raucously
funny in many places, but it still feels pleasantly understated overall;
the examination of a sports agent’s world of double-crossing, greed,
performance enhancement, and hubris call into question a lot about our
society in general, but it doesn’t beat it over your head.
