Playwright: Lynn Marie
At: The Billy Goat Experiment at the Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway
Phone: (773) 250-3331; $10
Runs through: April 20
Even in the so-called Roaring Twenties, Aimee Semple McPherson (legally, Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy Semple McPherson Hutton) attracted attention. A woman preacher, let alone a thrice-married one, was unusual enough, but erecting a massive temple in the heart of Hollywood and outfitting it with the new-fangled wireless radio in order to spread the Gospel over the airwaves —well, to more conservative Christians, that smacked a little too much of show business. Then there was the media frenzy surrounding her alleged kidnapping—had she actually been held for ransom by captors never brought to justice, or was the pulchritudinous celebrity having a secret affair with her broadcasting engineer?
Whether Aimee Semple McPherson was a feminist pioneer or one of America's great con-artists, there is an interesting play in her life story. Unfortunately, the biodrama authored for the Billy Goat Experiment by company member Lynn Marie is not yet that play. Instead of anchoring her narrative in a single aspect of her subject's adventures, Marie arranges her material in relentlessly linear sequence. And since Marie's chief source appears to be the writings of McPherson herself, long passages of prose seemingly transferred verbatim to the stage assume a self-congratulatory tone no less annoying for being inevitable.
A straightforward one-woman show would need only some rewriting to achieve its goals. More troublesome are the Brechtian devices director Stephen E. Lehman incorporates into his production: a six-person chorus portraying all auxiliary characters, sometimes grotesquely masked. Synchronized-movement/orchestrated-vocal exercises (one in which the ensemble transforms itself into a sputtery Model T). Video clips grainy and indistinct enough to be authentic dawn-of-the-film-age footage. Mass faith-healings depicted in riots of Artaudian agony. McPherson's abduction presented in the manner of a silent-movie melodrama, and that of her third marriage—to an opera singer—recounted in ersatz-classical song.
However uniformly well-crafted they may be, the alienation effect engendered by these artistic conceits undermines the intimacy necessary to our heroine's credibility, while stretching the show's running time to two-and-a-half-hours that feels much longer. As a work-in-progress, Aimee shows promise, but further development will be required for it to work its miracles.