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With a handful of plays -- Native Speech, On the Verge, In
Perpetuity Throughout the Universe, and now In a Pig's
Valise -- Eric Overmyer has established himself as one of
contemporary theater's wittiest playwrights. Language-besotted
as any die-hard cruciverbalist and hip to the self-referential
existentialism of post-modern performance, he keeps his
intellect in balance with a deep need to entertain; he's a
clown with a thesaurus, an incorrigible punster, and a
"prisoner of genre, a captive of kitsch," like the
all-singing, all-dancing, trench-coated gumshoe narrator of In
a Pig's Valise. Summoned to the Heartbreak Hotel -- on the
corner of Neon and Lonely -- by an ethnic folk dancer named
Dolores Con Leche who claims someone is stealing her dreams,
James Taxi (Nathan lane) poses as a talent scout to
investigate an international ring of brain-drainers
treasure-hunting "scenarios for the insatiable maw of
popular entertainment." On Bob Shaw's ingeniously compact
black-and-neon set, director- choreographer Graciela Daniele
makes great cartoonish fun out of all this; off-Broadway
hasn't had such a dazzling little musical since Little Shop
of Horrors. And composer August Darnell (of Kid Creole and
the Coconuts fame) is a perfect match for Overmyer's pulpy
genre-mashing; there are comic quotation marks around his
cheesy Caribbean cha-chas ("Kiss Me Deadly"), his
gooey Gloria Estefan-ish ballads ("If I Was a Fool to
Dream"), and the hilariously sleazy bump-and-grinds
Dolores performs with "the ever-lactating Balkanettes,"
Mustang Sally and Dizzy Miss Lizzy.
A pop semiotician like Jean Baudrillard could go to town
analyzing the junk-culture-eats-itself imagery of Pig's
Valise, and that's what makes the play more than a
hyperclever goof: underneath the puns and wordplay, it is a
metaphysical detective story about the origin of pop-kitsch (a
theme throughout Overmyer's work) that treads the same
territory as sci-fi renegades William Gibson and Philip K.
dick. Musically the shows has a few wrinkles to iron out;
Darnell's rock-band arrangements could use more variety, and
leading man Lane's singing voice is only passable (though for
a snub-nosed butterball, he does a pretty sexy hoochie-koochie
dance). The show's sizzling star is Ada Maris as Dolores --
her Betty Boop eye-dance is a great running joke -- but
there's also fine, funny supporting work by Reg E. Cathey as a
voguing security guard and by Lauren Tom and Dian Sorel as
those zesty Balkanettes. (Full Disclosure Dept.: the Second
Stage's Robyn Goodman consulted me when searching for
composers, so I get a talent scout's "special
thanks" in the program.)
7 Days, February 22, 1989
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