Playwright: Chris Garcia Peak
At: Collision Theatre at National Pastime
Phone: ( 312 ) 281-8041; $15
Runs through: April 2
Shotgun Wedding isn't my cup of tea. It's a colorful show done in a non-realistic style, someplace between live-action cartoon and outrageous sitcom with a salacious attitude, high drag costumes and gratuitous flashes of cock and snatch. I enjoy raucous and rude as much as the next guy, but the show fails to establish its premise while ignoring basic rules of storytelling even non-realistic theater should follow. Fatally, it's intolerable, self-indulgent length of two hours and 45 minutes is an hour too long. A little cartoon goes a long way.
Writer/director Chris Garcia Peak, the gay artistic director of the brand-new Collision Theatre, says Shotgun Wedding is a comedy about a revolutionary theocracy that bans lipstick, champagne, fortune cookies, etc. and gays/lesbians who are shipped to New Zealand for conversion therapy. Marriage and procreation are the New Order's orders. Each of the 12 scenes is announced by a religious rule ranging from Light is Good to Drinking Makes You Act Like Robert De Niro.
Trouble is, we don't see the fascist theocracy in action. Instead, the play focuses on a brother and his two sisters who flaunt all the rules, parade around nearly naked and indulge in prurient sex in front of powerful members of the religious government who barely bat an eyelash. In other words, there aren't any consequences for disobedience or subversion, and the good guys—in theory the brother and sisters—are as self-absorbed and dishonest as the bad guys. Brother Jacques and sister Pamela attempt to force Lesbian sister Therese into marriage in order to protect their own sybarism, which is the thrust of the eight comic-strip-like scenes of long Act I to the detriment of story and theme.
Unnamed characters enter without exposition or context. Not knowing how they fit in, we don't care about them. Some actors use European accents ( at least at the start ) , but others don't. Huh? Some don't enunciate well, so their words become loud mush in the hard-walled space. Acknowledging numerous literary sources both obvious and obscure, the play's funniest lines are Dorothy Parker quotes.
The company isn't without talent or potential. Care is taken in the visual style ( especially Lindsey Pate's costumes ) and the physical work shows discipline and control. Peak's combinations of tableaux, text and music are interesting. Shotgun Wedding does stir to life and recall its announced concept after intermission, with a change in tone in a moving scene between Therese and her lover—sent to New Zealand—and a satirical religious sketch that's too true to be good. But the change is too little and far too late. Throughout, Shotgun Wedding emphasizes shtick over storytelling without sensing when enough is enough, and without discerning its own wheat—there IS some—from its chaff.