Original words by Quentin Tarantino, adapted by Roundhouse Productions. At: Think Tank, 1770 W. Berteau. Tickets: Online at brownpapertickets.com and at the door; $15 . Runs through: Dec. 10
The stage seems as good a place as any for Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino's verbose and largely stationary feature-film debut, and when you're a fledgling theatre company like Roundhouse Productions, when the performance space you can afford to rent is second only to using an actual abandoned warehouse, you're halfway home. However, instead of taking the gimme, director and Roadhouse co-founder Cody Evans has gone a step further and cast his dogs as females.
Anyone expecting a slightly burlesque drag-king production should check that at the door. These women—albeit young women, many of whom are recent college grads—are indeed playing women criminals, and their objective is to prove that ladies can handle the excessive cursing and fighting and bring the same level of badass to this iconic story.
Opposite sex casting and redubbing characters "Ms." White and "Ms." Pink are easy switches to flip, but accomplishing it all the way through the soul of each character poses a much more immense challenge. The ladies of Reservoir Dogs have fun with the crude dialogue and some even give commanding performances, but the idea of "let's let the girls show what they can do" drives the performance more than addressing how the story might have felt different if the criminals had all been women.
Regardless of the artistic depth of the choice to cast women, the key here is that this production won't leave many people pining for the guttural machismo of a male performance. Some of the girls have trouble with the dialogue, mostly in the beginning with the take on the diner scene, but this stems from the difficulty of Tarantino's conversational style and tightly scripted use of cursing. It takes a certain skill set to make it all feel natural, but that's a matter of experience, not sex.
Once the tension ratchets up after the heist goes wrong, the high drama helps get the ladies into their element, which immerses the audience and creates a rhythm to the rest of the play. Brittany Ellis, as Ms. White (the Harvey Keitel character), demonstrates the best command of the dialogue among the black-tie gang while Whitney LaMora comes in as Ms. Blonde (the sinister Michael Madsen character) and takes the action to a whole other level. The (Ms.) Blonde role presents the most intimidating challenge, in part due to the film's unforgettable "Stuck in the Middle" sequence, but she makes the part her own while still conveying the character's malicious and psychotic nature.
Fans of the film will be disappointed that this production strips the (Ms.) Orange subplot and character of a lot of power, as all the flashback scenes prior to the warehouse action are lumped into the beginning to avoid lengthy costume changes. This zaps all the tension over who the rat could be, but the core of the film, the ideas of trust and human nature as embodied in Ms. White's kinship with Ms. Orange, still prevail. You could argue they are even magnified a bit by the feminine energy on stage as bonds of friendship obviously have a different chemistry between two women as compared to two men.
Watching the cast operate you can tell this production has united them in a way that more typically feminine and distinctly less ballsy material simply can't. Also, despite the challenges of young actors doing Tarantino, they still prove their thesis that women can, in fact, bring a similar bravado to a story written entirely for men. In effect, they successfully answer the film's seminal question as it applies to them: "Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?"
