Sex, Guns, and Vodka @ The Classics Theatre Project
—Martha Heimberg
Who are all these noisy people? All dressed up, partying down, talking their heads off and swilling vodka like they’re in the middle of a Russian play?
That’s easy.
Artistic director Joey Folsom of The Classics Theatre Project calls his adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s early untitled play Sex, Guns, and Vodka. Staged at the Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park, the play (also directed by Folsom) is a party from the get-go, and just gets crazier and funnier as the booze flows and the guests’ thin inhibitions melt in the heat of suburban romance. Folsom’s title certainly sums up the major themes in this comic four-act melodrama (a Russian re-telling of the Don Juan story) the famed playwright wrote when he was 18—unpublished in his lifetime and discovered by scholars in 1923.
With four acts and 22 characters, the original work would have run nearly four hours, and was considered un-performable. All adapters have shortened it; Folsom cuts the time and characters by half, keeps intact Chekhov’s satire of the idle semi-rich, and pushes the performance into hilarious soap opera territory. Chekhov, I’m thinkin’, would laugh out loud at the giant vodka bottle with a spray attachment, introduced in the second act to revive a faltering philanderer.
The play begins at a party in the late 1970s. We’re at a rich woman’s estate in the middle of a forest, simply and cleverly created in the Margo Jones’ intimate arena space by an ample liquor cabinet at the rear and a dozen artificial Christmas trees surrounding the playing space. Everybody’s grooving to ‘70’s tunes in ‘70s clothes, kicking balloons out of the way, and talking about money problems or the particular failings of their mates. The glam hostess Anna (a sensual, knowing Madyson Greenwood) is welcoming and effusive in a red, low-cut dress and frizzy hairdo. The local doctor Porfiry (a manic, eye-shifting Jackie L. Kemp) gossips hard and drinks harder. Some old dude in a bad wig is looking for a wife. Then in walks Platonov (bluff, confident Robert San Juan), a handsome schoolteacher and the neighborhood’s well-known tortured intellectual, confirmed Casanova, and all-round wastrel.
Platonov is married to patient Sasha (a hapless Rhonda Rose), but that doesn’t keep him from flirting with all the ladies and charming everyone. The women, young and not so young, love it. They can’t get enough of this famously faithless seducer, who comes on like a man who can’t live another day without the love of fill-in-the-blank. In his tweedy suit and pageboy haircut, San Juan’s cocky Platonov rattles off effortless amorous lines to every woman within arm’s reach, and dictates even longer, cheesier letters to those an estate over. In a funny repeat bit, a wandering postman (David Britto) walks through the woods, delivering endless notes—and a court summons—to our drunken Don Juan.
San Juan manages to be both a seriously psychotic sex addict looking for prey, and a hilariously exhausted Romeo running from the women clamoring for his body. That’s the fun of Folsom’s adaptation. On the one hand, we feel sorry for all the women who fall for Platonov, not just his dim wife. The book-smart, socially naïve chemist Marie (wide-eyed, eager Janae Hatchett) makes a fool of herself over Platonov. His young former student (a bold, strident Devon Rose) is so smitten, she dumps her new husband (a raucous, campy Jon Garrard) to run off with him. Even sophisticated Anna, old enough to know better, can’t wait to get vodka-soaked, sex-weary Platonov in bed. But hey. Don’t these women see it coming? Platonov’s escape from the bed of one woman, only to land in the arms of another, drives the humor in Folsom’s adaptation.
Then, along with the sex and vodka, there actually are some guns in young Chekhov’s mix. Here, the guns (and a knife) are wooden and painted bright red, like toys. Maybe the most intricate of turns in Folsom’s timely adaption is not just the spoof of melodrama and romantic seduction, but the careful pacing of comic tone and dark action in the tragi-farcical scene that ends the show.
WHEN: Closing June 11 (shows on June 10 & 11)
WHERE: Margo Jones Theatre, 1121 First Avenue (Fair Park), Dallas
