After a few months` production hiatus, in which its co-artistic directors became parents, igLoo, the theater troupe with the oddly written name, is back in action with a typically igLoo-esque evening: an alternately inventive and sophomoric staging of the crazed ”Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo.”
Unleasing igLoo`s customary enthusiasm for flamboyant action, this production is based on the English adaptation of a series of monologues for women devised by the Italian husband and wife team of Dario Fo and Franca Rame.
A mime, comedian, actor-manager and political activist who enjoyed a brief vogue in English in the late `70s and early `80s through his satirical plays ”Accidental Death of an Anarchist” and ”We Won`t Pay! We Won`t Pay!” Fo is a specialist in mounting outrageous attacks on conventional manners and mores.
”Orgasmo Adulto,” a revue he created with Rame, was first staged in the United States by Rame and the American actress Estelle Parsons in 1983 at the New York Shakespeare Festival`s Public Theatre as a two-part program of eight monologues for women, all played by Parsons.
In igLoo`s second-floor space at 3829 N. Broadway, director Christopher Peditto has used only four of these monologues, dividing them in an intermissionless evening between two actresses, Valerie Olney and Mary-Beth Kelleher. Also briefly on stage are a ”Queen of Love” mistress of ceremonies (Gina Vera McLaughlin) and two near-nude male ”love slaves” (Doug Spinuzza and David Grieco) who later assume small, silent roles.
Beginning with an illustrated rhapsody on sexual organs blasted over a sound-distorting amplification system by the ”Queen of Love,” the program moves on to its basic business, which is to give repressed, enraged women the opportunity to express dismay, disgust and contempt for their male sexual partners.
Two short stories, both performed at a rapid clip by Olney, involve a woman who triumphantly seduces a male visitor, and an innocent little girl who is set straight on the ways of love by her foul-mouthed rag doll.
The longest, maddest piece of the evening is Kelleher`s ”A Woman Alone,” about a housewife locked up in an apartment by her husband with only her kitchen appliances, her snoring brat, her crippled brother-in-law and an obscene phone caller for company.
A fat woman dressed in slip and housecoat, she speaks to an off-stage neighbor, telling her of how she attempted suicide after her brutish husband discovered her naked with a much younger man. Pushed over the brink by her awful existence, in which she is holed up ”like a corpse,” she throws the brother-in-law out the window, shoots the peeping tom who has been spying on her and levels her rifle at her husband as he crashes through the door.
Finally, just in case the message hasn`t gotten through yet, the program ends with Kelleher portraying Medea, the classic man-hater, who slaughtered her two sons when her husband tossed her over for a new, younger wife.
Better to be a voracious beast than a docile goat, says the bloody Medea, and, as she holds aloft the knife with which she will murder her children, she intones, ”Die to become a woman.”
Peditto pumps up these tirades with slide projections, loud music, blaring horns, off-stage voices, strobe lights and thunderclaps, but all this, and the actresses, cannot overcome the venomous monotony of the monologues. There`s no escape from the one-note viciousness of the material.
`ORGASMO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO`
A performance piece based on Estelle Parsons` adaptation of a work by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Directed by Christopher Peditto, with costumes by Gina McLaughlin, designs of poetic figures by Mary-Beth Kelleher, and scenery, sound and lights by Peditto. Opened May 25 at the igLoo theater, 3829 N. Broadway, and plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Sunday, through July 2. Length of performance: 1:20. Tickets are $12, with discounts available for students, senior citizens and groups. Phone 975-2077.
THE CAST
Valerie Olney and Mary-Beth Kelleher, with Gina Vera McLaughlin, Doug Spinuzza and David Grieco.
