Debuting tonight, Production Workshop's final major play of the semester, "Stone Cold Dead Serious," explores the struggle for autonomy and hope within the confines of a broken and crumbling lower-middle-class family. The play, written by Adam Rapp and directed by Adam Mazer '08, manipulates the familiar tropes of the family drama genre in a plot that is both tragically realistic and yet hilariously fantastical. The result is a dark comedy that keeps the audience on their toes.
"Stone Cold Dead Serious" follows 16-year-old video game genius Wynne Ledbetter, played by Aubie Merrylees '10, in his attempts to hold together his shattered family living in the northern suburbs of Chicago while journeying to compete in a national video game competition in New York City.
Wynne's father, Cliff, played by Michael Hammond '08, has been rendered childlike and barely functional after sustaining a back injury and consequently abusing his painkillers while watching TV. Wynne takes care of Cliff while his scatterbrained and overworked mother Linda, played by Alexandra Panzer '08, works double shifts at a diner. Wynne also tries to help his runaway older sister Shaylee, played fiercely by Jessie Hopkins '08, a prostitute and drug addict who surreptitiously visits the house to steal money from her parents.
Merrylees truly captures the spirit of Wynne, whose obsession with video games seems to be his only distraction from the demands placed upon him to hold together his family members. The inversion of familial relationships is apparent as Cliff, Linda and Shaylee simultaneously depend upon and neglect or abuse Wynne.
Hopkins, Hammond and Panzer all take on second roles in the show. Hopkins plays Wynne's mute girlfriend, Sharice, another finalist in the video-game competition. The colorful figures Wynne meets during his journey to New York include Jack Gam, a traveling salesman played by Hammond, and Snake Lady, Wynne and Sharice's loony neighbor in their New York hotel, played by Panzer. Panzer shines as Snake Lady, delivering a memorably hilarious performance.
Each of the characters is depicted as both sad and funny, capturing the unusual yet compelling attitude of the play itself.
The combination of ordinary sets in the foreground and colorful lighting in the background reinforced the realistic and surreal duality apparent in the plot at the show's Wednesday dress rehearsal. The music selection also reinforces the ironic nature of the play by adding a humorous yet sometimes unsettling compliment to the scenes.
The presence of three lit screens facing the audience incorporates the viewer into the dominant activity in the lives of the characters - watching television. "The show revolves around TV and things happening on screens," Mazer said, adding, "we thought that it would look cool ... (and be) symbolically relevant."
The almost unbearably crude dialogue facilitates rapid shifts from amusement to shock and from tragedy to humor. These shifts keep the audience alert and transfixed by the overwhelmingly tragic yet seemingly realistic events of the play. Although the second act lacks some of the pacing and continuity of the first, partly due to gaps in time and place between scenes, the show successfully chronicles the unique process of reconciliation and healing of the Ledbetter family.
An April 2003 New York Times review called "Stone Cold Dead Serious" a play "aimed to shock an audience with depictions of familial depravity and youthful nihilism ... (without) the familiar mixture of pity and disgust. Rather ... (there is) a flicker of something else, an acknowledgment that love and caring do exist and that these people live in a world that is not devoid of these things."
"Stone Cold Dead Serious" runs Nov. 16-19 in the black box theater of T.F. Green Hall.
