‘Tigers Be Still’ @ MainStage 222
Photos by Mike Morgan Photography
—Martha Heimberg
First you have to get out of bed. Get off the couch. Get out of your room. Oh, and avoid an escaped tiger.
The charm of Kim Rosenstock’s comedy Tigers Be Still is in the clever braiding of whimsical humor and serious problems facing the determined young heroine, at home and on her first job ever. When you laugh, you gotta breathe.
Sherry (a determinedly upbeat Raven Lawes) grabs a mic and, karaoke style, steps right up to the audience at MainStage 222’s 50-seat black box theater in downtown Irving. This is the story,” she says, of how she got herself out of bed and “stopped being a total disaster,” in spite of anxiety, loneliness and the other terrors of trying to get a job, and surviving a crazy, loving, dysfunctional family. Sound familiar?
The play, which premiered at the Roundabout Theater Company on Broadway in 2010, might sound like just another millennial sit-com at the outset, but this show quickly becomes an honest, often comic portrayal of real people stumbling toward freedom, community, maybe even love.
Sherry is back home with a master’s in art therapy, unemployed at 24, and desperately trying to get her life on track and her numbed-out family to wake up and maybe turn off the TV. Her sister Grace (Wendi Evetts, a total slob couch potato, with extra sour cream) got dumped almost at the altar, and is in a cozy relationship with Jack Daniels and Top Gun, which she views over and over. Grace does take some pleasure in the fact that she’s kidnapped her ex’s two precious chihuahuas and locked them in the basement, where they bark like big dogs. Evetts is hilarious throughout, throwing a sealed bag of dog food through the door, or wailing the miserably sad lyrics of The Rose theme song: “Some say love/it is a razor/that leaves your soul to bleed.” Shee.
Mom, who never appears onstage, phones from an upstairs bedroom where she’s locked herself in: her immune disease meds have made her so fat she can’t bear to be seen. Dad, as Sherry explains in narrator mode, went out on an errand some months ago, and never came back.
Sherry is, nevertheless, glowing with optimism because she is suddenly offered a job teaching art at the town’s middle school. Her very first job! Turns out her mom set it up, because the principal (a gruffly sweet-natured Dan Morrow) was her high school sweetheart back when they were prom queen and king. On day one at the school, the principal’s first announcement is that a tiger (it’s in the title, remember?) has escaped from the zoo, and is being sought in a 100-square-mile area that includes their campus. He notes that tigers are “fast, big, mean, and have stripes.” This man is on it, having hired “three policemen, plus six lunchroom monitors” to guard student safety.
The principal has also asked Sherry to counsel his troubled 18-year-old son Zach (a charged-up John Marshall, shifting comically and endearingly from moody jerk to adorable sweetie to full-on teen fury) who has developed “anger management issues” since his mother’s death. We see Zack grousing on the job at CVS, and later (after he’s fired from that job) witness the results of his fight with the boss at Walgreens.
Poor Sherry. She must scooch Grace into a corner of the sofa for her first session with Zack, who isn’t thrilled by assignments that involve drawing and writing in a journal. He glowers with sheer disgust when she perkily requests that he prepare to demonstrate how to build a popsicle stick house to her third-graders. His demo is definitely less.
Director Bruce Coleman utilizes the intimacy of the theater to make us a part of the real joy the sisters feel in the silliness of singing an old song together, or the awkwardness of a widowed father trying, with comic intensity, to sew a button on his son’s shirt. Coleman keeps the action fast and fluid, as actors move between three multi-level platforms in Wendy Searcy-Woode’s adroit set. John Aspholm’s lighting design allows actors to appear instantly in a new space between blackout scenes.
Songs from the era help weave the show together as well. We recognize TV theme songs as they pop into the dialogue. When Sherry recalls her mom’s 60’s love affair with the principal, we hear clips of Beach Boys and Beatles songs, perfectly placed by sound designer Michael Cannon.
The show is 95 minutes long, with a 15-minute intermission. Long before the final bow, I was totally engaged by how Lawes’ ebullient Sherry hugs and sings her depressed sister into action. And she reaches out ever-so-patiently with a laugh or a smile for young Zach—so fiercely embodied by Marshall, you’d think a tiger truly was chasing him.
The notion of a tiger running loose for many weeks in a suburban town may be absurd, but this feline meets his match in a quiet and beautifully revealing moment that the show delivers perfectly. It does not involve two escaped tiny dogs.
Bring a jacket to this warmly comic show; the theater is marvelously chilly.
WHEN: August 11-26, 2023
WHERE: 222 E. Irving Blvd., Irving TX
WEB: mainstageirving.com
