Playwright: Clifford Morts
At: Actors Workshop Theatre,
1044 W. Bryn Mawr
Phone: (312) 622-1136;
$15 (suggested donation)
Runs through: Feb. 22
Liars and Angels is divided into three separate pieces, all loosely connected to themes of deception and forgiveness. The evening starts off promisingly with Promotion to Glory, a Twilight Zone-esque tale of a major in the Salvation Army who has died and gone to God's waiting room, where he is knocked down a peg or two by a bureaucratic angel who chastises him for the many 'small, unnecessary evils' he's committed throughout the course of his self-righteous life. The piece is a pretty good screed against 'godliness' and the excesses of right-wing fundamentalism. I don't know how accurate the piece is, but it will be satisfying to anyone who has ever been outraged by the likes of Fred Phelps or Dr. Laura.
The Liar and Norman Mailer is an odd short piece about a chance encounter between a stalkerish young man and someone who may be Norman Mailer. The young man begs for some dirt the celebrity author must surely have acquired during his many years in the public eye, but Mailer claims amnesia when it comes to gossip about the likes of Tommy Lee Jones and Chad Everett (whom the play claims is married to Barbra Streisand; Babs would beg to differ, as would her husband, James Brolin). Eventually, the Mailer character offers some particularly tasteless tidbits about his own life to appease the young sycophant (having to do with drunkenness, impotence, hemorrhoids, and the like).
It's the last and longest piece that sticks in my mind as one of the vilest pieces of theater I've ever seen. The Language of Cherubs is anything but. The Language of the Despicable and Weak is more like it. Essentially the monologue of a dying southern woman (played with one-note weepiness by Jan Ellen Graves), the piece is an overview of her life with her husband. At first, their life together seems pedestrian, the stuff of thousands of American couples. But as the woman rambles on, we discover a dark underbelly. Her husband was a pedophile, preying on the high school girls he taught and exploiting his position of authority to take advantage of them. In one of the most chilling moments, the woman begins reciting the names of the girls ... and the list runs on into the dozens. But as she crawls back into her bed to sink under the oblivion of painkillers, with her Pat Boone look-alike husband at her side, she tells him that, in spite of all this, she really 'loves' him. What? It's hard to muster up any sympathy for this pair: a sexual predator and the woman who unquestioningly stands by her man, in spite of the rather strained efforts of the playwright to jerk tears from the audience (along with banal musical touches of recorded new-age piano music from Jim Brickman).
I couldn't wait to exit the theater at the end of Liars and Angels, to get back out to Bryn Mawr Avenue, where the air was at least relatively fresh and clean.
